The first request is slow because lazy loading means news has to load stuff from disk. That's why the second request is much faster.

I could fix this by only loading stuff the moment I need to display it. Right now I load enough to generate 7 pages of threads, but people rarely click on the More link, so I'm dragging a lot of items into memory unnecessarily.

I'll try fixing this when I have time. Unfortunately I have to write a talk right now, and this is going to require turning some code inside out.