I just installed Tor and I have it running in Firefox but it's going incredibly slow, taking up to 30 seconds to load a single page.  I'm also getting a "Proxy error: 502 Server dropped connection" message when I try to connect to Silk Road.  I don't really care about running Tor outside of getting to Silk Road but if anyone can help with one/both of these issues I'd appreciate it, and if Tor normally runs this slowly then at least I know it's not just me.

P.S. if it matters I'm running at least 18mbps when I just checked on Chrome, so it's not just a slightly slowed connection.

Edit: never mind, it took about six tries but I managed to connect.  If anyone still wants to explain the slow Tor issue that's fine but not necessary