Please help me understand the big difference between the different page load times reported as follows:

Atahualpa Footer --- 2.8 seconds
YSlow --- 13 seconds

Which one is the actual page load time as seen by search engines?
And which of the above is indicative of the actual page load time for first-time visitors?

The site in question is: DIY Computer Repair Resources

if you are talking about the '234 queries. 3.460 seconds.' that is how long Atahualpa measures the queries you are making to the database. The page load is dependent on many other things, like
- how many other sites are you grabbing info from
- what are those site's response times
- what is the load on the server the site is running on
- are the pages cached

these are just a few of the things that can effect the page load time

Essentially Atahualpa still ain't the fastest, but the Server is the main culprit. My sites take 0.3 to 0.4 seconds to render on a dedicated server (that idles mostly) with 8GB/i7 Quadcore. On my old Celeron 2.8Ghz it took 1.7-3seconds to render a page.

Thanks for your reply, so the one reported by YSlow is the actual page load time?

In the real world, YSlow seems rather useless as a measure of actual page loading speed. cnn.com, which loads very fast for me, gets a YSlow grade of D. One of my Ata sites, which for me seems to load a bit slower than cnn.com, gets a grade of C. Most of the problem on my site, according to YSlow, is that their are 21 components, mainly plugins, with no "expire headers." I get an F for that.

if you have two computers side by side and tell them both to load the page at the same time, but one is a PC with 256MB memory running XP on a 1.6mHz and 10 other programs running the other is a 3.0mHz machine with 8GB of memory running Win7 with only 1 program running, which is one will show the real page load time?

I've been looking at my page load times using Pingdom Tools and noticed this JS Loading:

wp-includes/l10n.js?ver=2010110

Searches came up with a way to remove it which is:

To remove it add the following to your theme's functions.php file:
wp_deregister_script('l10n');

So, the question is what the heck is it and is it needed?

did you try a google search?

Yes, that's how I found the solution to remove it. Seems to be some disagreement on exactly what it's for as it apparently started appearing in WP 3.1.

This is the WP Support Thread I found...maybe you'll understand it?

Two more threads I found that might help with speed:

This one discusses the wp-includes/l10n.js?ver=2010110 as well as comment-reply.js:

And this one has a simple fix for the comment-reply.js:

Would it be possible to incorporate the comment-reply.js: fix into future releases of Theme?

So we all need to add to the theme functions file?
What are the implications?