I've experienced this too, and I imagine that the latency has to do largely with the process of loading data from different shards into the cache. This post fr

I've experienced this too, and I imagine that the latency has to do largely with the process of loading data from different shards into the cache. This post from a few years ago notes that Twitter used to store the most recent posts for your timeline within their Redis cluster, and MySQL was used for long-term storage. If your account was not active within the cache, then they needed to reload your timeline info. from long-term storage. http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-twitter-uses-to-deal-with-150m-active-users.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-tw... I'm guessing that this is where the bulk of the latency is coming from, since subsequent page loads on different devices don't exhibit the same degree of latency.