The style sheet and Javascripts have become quite large, leading to long load times. I especially notice this in setting up Moodle on our sister school in Zambia which uses a satellite connection, but it is also obvious with modem connections where initial loads take nearly a minute. Even fast connections are too sluggish because of this.

Granted, CSS and Javascript are cached, at least for a while. But on initial load, reloads, or when the cache expires, these large files to be resent.

On 1.9 beta 2, here are the relative sizes:

CSS: 101K; 21 seconds at 56K
Javascript: 105K; 22 seconds at 56K
HTML (login page) 8K; 2 seconds at 56K
HTML images: 3K; 1 second at 56K

It seems like looking into cutting down on CSS and Javascript sizes so that they load only what is needed (especially at startup) and for the site home page and then perhaps segmenting these features would increase the responsiveness of Moodle to users, especially with slower connections.