I use python cgi for our intranet application.
When I measure time, the script takes 4s to finish. But after that, it still takes another 11s to show the screen in the browser. 
The screen is build with tables (size: 10 KB, 91 KB uncompressed) and has a large css file (5 KB, 58 KB uncompressed).
I used YSlow and did as much optimization as suggested. Gzipping etc. 
Firebug Net says: 11s for the file.
How do I measure where these last 11 seconds are needed for?
Is it just the size of the HTML, or the table structure?
Anyone more ideas for tweaking?
with that much html to render I would also consider the speed of the computer. you can test this by saving the html file and opening it from your local hard drive :)
Measure load time for python cgi script?