A bit confused about chrome results

[samsaffron]

Jarrod has 100ms to SO, but the CDN (netDNA/MaxCDN) is closer to him AND they uses fastsoft (http://www.fastsoft.com/home/) which totally cheats on TCP slow start, so it looks pretty fast.

In the field we place a JavaScript probe just before the body

// in top
<script type="text/javascript">mPt=function(){var t=[];return{t:t,probe:function(n){t.push({d:new Date(),n:n})}}}()</script>

// before body
<script type="text/javascript">mPt.probe(3)</script>

We report this + all window.performance probes to a central server for 10% of our requests.

btw ... ie9/10 do report msFirstPaint in navigationTimings which can be handy