You're not imaging things: I'm running a bit hot right now from HN load (https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH...) w/ ~170ms for the 99th percentile. It doesn't help that I'm running this on Heroku, which isn't known for being super fast.
I'll probably deploy this to https://fly.io/ in the future to a few different geographies around the world so that I can bring latency down for the entire planet while saving myself a boatload in hosting costs.
I wonder if fly.io/heroku matters for the servers however. Caching the webpage with a CDN sounds like most bang for buck right? One request is slow at the start of the day for the news (maybe its a user requesting far away the main server worst case) but every subsequent request is served from close to user CDN. (Not 100% if thats how it works in practice)
Speaking out loud here just to see if server location matters if you have a good CDN setup or something I'm missing which would make requests need to hit the main server.
I feel like it could be much faster at around 50ms or so with a cloudflare caching setup on the page, may be wrong.