How long does it take to resolve a namecoin key=>value pair? Considering the variable speed in these sorts of decentralized networks, is there a noticeable lag when you initially request a .bit website?
It's also almost exactly the same as DNS regarding name changing. You have to wait about 10 minutes for the blockchain to register a name, and then about 24 hours before all the cache servers update it.
Change propagation, on the other hand, is as long as blocks can travel from peer to peer.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...
Round trip in same datacenter: 500,00ns.
Disk seek: 4,000,000ns.
You have to lean on the numbers pretty hard to make the DNS faster, but it's possible it could be faster than your local disk.