I'm in the UK, if you're hosting US that's probably part of it, it's easy to forget that mainstream websites have a ton of CDN.

But yeah, they were gradual rendering over 1-2 seconds.

I was on mobile, not sure if you've used responsive image sizing or not as it's a faff to inspect source, but if you haven't it's a game changer for making image heavy websites snappy.

Then again, depends where you're getting the images from, could just be you were getting throttled because you got a bit of a HN hug of death.

Yeah that tracks. I'm currently only hosting out of us-central1 in GCP. Haven't got around to setting up multi-region or a proper CDN yet.