@chinesegeorge: Hello again, I was just about to ask. Server-side the site is much faster than before, no doubt, but you have raised our interest to check how the actual response times are around the World. Doing some testing with webpagetest.org, we have indeed noticed that the site appeared to be really slow from Shanghai (although at the same time reasonably quick from Hong Kong or Japan).
For example: accessing the site from NY - 1.7secs, Hong Kong 2.7 secs, Europe - 2.0 secs, Japan - 3.2 secs. In Shanghai the things appear much worse, some of the files were much slower or stalling completely. Not sure why - either a bad/slow connection with the rest of the web -- or the Great Firewall comes to mind.
To improve the response times around the world, we have now also re-plugged iModeler into a Content Delivery Network which should ensure that many parts of the site (images, scripts, stylesheets) that do not require interactivity will be stored on a server much closer to your location, including multiple nodes in China. Normally, this should improve response times in faraway locations.
This is about as much as we can do at this point, except waiting for a few more days in case any DNS records still haven't find their way to mainland China.
Hope this helps - please keep us posted about your experience with the site.
