Caching: plugin vs. browser

I might not be the only one who's a little confused about the whole caching issue.

In a continuing effort to speed up my site, I'm revisiting the wp-cache plugin. I had it running a while back but removed it when the hosting company said they had had problems with it on other sites.

Later on, Juggledad did some custom detective work for me and discovered several anomalies on my site, fixed those, and now things are running much better. Thank you, JD!

Now I figure I'll try a caching plugin again. So I have wp-cache running, I've enabled the visible stopwatch in the footer, and I've got CSS and JS set to external. I'm getting 1.410 seconds with Safari and 1.650 with Firefox. Both are after dumping the browser cache.

I would appreciate some of you visiting http://www.larchmontgazette.com and tell me what reading you get in the footer, what your browser and platform are, then dump cache and try again. That would be very helpful.

I don't quite understand.....if wp-cache is caching pages and serving them up as static pages, how does that affect the browser's cache? If I dump the browser cache and reload a page, what am I getting?

To do a really clean test, I also dumped the wp-cache cache file and started fresh with clean browser caches, too. I guess that means any other readers after that were also getting uncached pages, right?