No idea about the ping; that should work as it is just a fixed ip, and the router hasn't been down afaik. The speed also shouldn't be the fault of the router, as I have at times had pages served from other machines, and they have been zippy enough for a household connection. It's also just as slow when I connect through its 192.xxx ip address, as opposed to the public ip, so I don't think it's a networking issue in the sense of external routing complications.
The trouble has to be in the platform, software and hardware. I am not sure what NPDS has to do to serve webpages as all, but presumably there would have to be Newtonscripts running that direct a Note not to the screen, but to ethernet and to you as the endpoint, which is not actually supposed to be happening at all in the NewtonOS (thus, e.g., in NPDS the screen does not change when pages are served, apart from reporting hits). Presumably, therefore, NPDS is doing something funny at the routing level through Newtonscript. You have to remember too that NIE (Newton Internet Enabler) itself was designed for modems rather than later networking standards. So much of what is happening at NIE level in the machine is based on this and that later hack, and how good the hacks in question were is anyone's guess. They are not, however, the work of Walter Smith and co., inc.
NPDS itself could be optimized further, as it is open source, but development stopped dead about a decade ago and was only ever the work of one man, I believe. It crashes several times a day, usually (but mostly auto-recovers). So it is an interesting, but limited piece of software that suffers from the usual problems that we have with open source ideals in the vintage Mac community: many and perhaps most of us never learned to code (presumably since we didn't like nasty command lines and the barrenness of text editors, which were for the 'dark side').
The other thing is the hardware. Even the much faster Newton 2100 is slow serving pages, like the (probable) best of the bunch
here, and my page is running on a much less capable eMate -- albeit an eMate with the Newertech memory upgrade (which makes a big difference to the usefulness of the machine).
Now, my pages use custom css for the most part (albeit very simple) rather than (mostly) the built-in css. That may be slowing it down, or maybe not. I did test first with the built-in css, and I didn't notice it as being any faster than it was later with my own code. I did not try with absolutely Spartan code, but that would make an interesting experiment.
Still, stability issues and slowness and all aside, it is an interesting device to tinker with in this way if you happen to have one lying around. Your posts are simply Notes written in the NotePad and filed in a designated web folder. There is a little html, and there are a handful of NPDS naming conventions, but there's not much to it. So it would lend itself well to a sort of vintage blogging.
Which reminds me — I ought to make another couple of posts to keep it rolling.
