TweetMeme has become the de facto standard of retweet buttons, it’s hard to find a blog without it.  Little do we know just how slow it is – to be exact, how much it slows down site access.  This might not appear a big deal, until you we realize that Google now considers site speed as a factor in determining Page Rank.

I quickly ran my personal blog through the Web Page Test, and here’s what I got: TweetMeme is about the only killer, slower than anything by a long mile.

The above chart is the result of initial access – below are the results of repeat access, when a lot of data is already cached:

Not a pretty picture – but for now, I am leaving TweetMeme anyway… hoping for a solution soon.