Confluence is extremely slow to load pages when network latency is significant

We evaluated Confluence 2.10.3 on an Amazon EC2 instance as outlined in Adrian's blog here http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/2009/04/setting_up_jira_and_confluence.html. We've noticed that Confluence running in this configuration can be sluggish when first loading pages. We're currently using Trac hosted on a machine in our office, which is pretty snappy. I signed up to the Confluence 3.0 hosted trial to see if the response times were any better, and it seems to be about the same as our instance running in EC2. We have a good net connection here at the office (ADSL2+), so I don't expect that's a factor.

YSlow grades Confluence an E when navigating to a space for the first time. Notice that 28 Javascript files are loaded. These really should be aggregated in to one javascript file for performance.

See the attached pictures for the YSlow and Firebug reports.

Any suggestions on how to get Confluence running better in this configuration?