Thanks for your reply.
Below is a screen dump of the test page I set up which makes 10 requests to a test function. The test function makes a standard CFHTTP call. Each request is timed and the time output on the page.
From what's there it gives no insight to me of what is actually happening or causing the requests to take so long to complete.
I've had a look around online the last few hours for web socket example but can find nothing other than creating a chat room! Do you have a link to any material or pseudo code that would allow me to create a test page that used web sockets so I could make a comparison between the request times?