A whole second?  Something's definitely wrong.
Try running "ping rlgallery.org" from the command line.  If you get more than 200 milliseconds, it's probably the network.
Your browser might make a difference too.  Chromium feels a little faster than Firefox, I'm not sure about IE yet.  Is redrawing the whole screen, like when you check your inventory, significantly slower than just making a single move?
I'm also planning to rewrite some of the server, which should speed response times up, but not by more than 50 milliseconds.