You can over optimize for speed too though. One of the past designs I had for unscatter.com was to start pre rendering the base page and then loading in results

You can over optimize for speed too though. One of the past designs I had for unscatter.com was to start pre rendering the base page and then loading in results. The idea being get something in front of the user as soon as possible. Over all I found it actually delayed getting the actual content to the user. It seemed faster, but was actually slower. In the end I've found in most cases the apis I use return pretty fast and have just settled with getting the content and displaying to the user as simply as possible. My daily experience with the site has proven to me this works best. IMHO if you're in the 1 second or less area for page display I don't think you're going to run anyone off.