I think api.hive.blog has almost always had the strongest overall performance (because it was internally supporting several hiveminds and hiveds), but it also had the most traffic, so performance perceived by an individual user of the api server would often seem lower than the performance of a lightly loaded api server.

There could also sometimes be latency issues associated with when we served some of the data from outside it's primary data center while doing testing on experimental versions of hivemind.

With our recent changes, the large amount of traffic going there just doesn't load us much at all and we're serving with a single hivemind locally situated in the data center, so even perceived performance (responsiveness/low latency) should be very good.