Has anyone experienced extremely slow data loading?

I have a set of 12 charts. Flex reads an XML configuration file to get the
URLs for the xml chart data. Then it calls each data set o fill the charts. All
in all there are 2400 peices of data to load, 200 for each chart.

My problem is that the initial loading is taking 20 - 30 seconds. The server
is written in Python (by someone else).

Does anyone have any adivce on the problem here and how to speed it up?