Well, your particular post which I am replying to is approximately 515 bytes. I'd say a running average of each post on Free Republic would be in the 1000 byte range. Since you can preview how many replies a post has, you can get a good, general idea before you click on it. So a 1 post started and 19 followups might come in around 20,000 bytes or 320,000 bits (this page of this thread is around 23,000 bytes), which a 56kilobit modem, connected at 49,996 bits per second would take about 3.2 seconds to download. If you have DSL, which downloads in greater than 512,000bits per second, it would take less than 3/8 of a second to download.
Now, if images are tacked in, that of course increases YOUR download time as you are drawing bandwidth from multiple sources to generate the full experience. So a thread could have 20 total posts for 20,000 bytes of data on FR, but each post could link in a 1,000,000 byte BITMAP from other websites that would increase your total aggregate post download to 20,020,000 bytes (or 20 Megabytes). Since FR.com has no way of polling the thousands of websites whose hosted images are linked on FR.com, there is no way for them to accurately show what the total bandwidth (thus time) would be for loading the thread.
So, if you don't like long loads, quit your complaining and just turn off images in your web browser.
I''ve had to resort to that, occasionally. In many cases the offending images are posted in lieu of a comment, and don't express anything that couldn't be said in a couple of sentences.