I just finished a very interesting talk by Ilya Grigorik, a Google engineer about web performance. It covers a lot of different aspect, including tcp latency, dns resolution, browser internals to fetch and parse the pages end so on.
One quick note about a cool trick when using google analytics:
_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 100]);
This tell the analytics tool to sample 100% of your users. The limit is 10k visits per day, so for personal websites it's definitely not a problem.