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This article http://robertnyman.com/2010/01/15/how-to-reduce-the-number-of-http-requests/ contains some interesting ideas about making pages faster to load.

The one that is attracting attention is base-64 encoding small images and inlining them. One criticism of this approach is that individually loaded images are cached whereas a web page may be loaded afresh each time thus increasing page load times overall.

However if the inlining is done in a css file (which is cached) then there could be a benefit at the cost of a longer initial download. A tool is mentioned called cssembed which does this to all image references in your css file, for icons etc this might end up being a significant win. Of course if you embed dozens of icons for a page which contains none it might not look such a good idea, but for headers, navigation etc it could be worth the effort.

Anyway, an interesting idea and one for the toolbox.

Thoughts?

Anyway, an interesting idea and one for the toolbox.

I’m looking through it now. It’s interesting, yes, but I wonder if it’s not much ado over not much? HTTP requests these days are usually handled in an efficient manner in Apache. Hardware is ever faster, and bandwidth ever greater and less expensive. A judicious use of CSS would seem to be in order for an efficient site with plenty of graphics, but the answer to how much is too much is always the same?

It depends.

Hardware, bandwidth, server configuration, layout, graphic sizes (Apache works about the same on small images as large images), and so on.

One thing that has helped me deal with sites on shared hosts (limited hardware resources) is simple—moderation in all things.

... but I wonder if it’s not much ado over not much? HTTP requests these days are usually handled in an efficient manner in Apache. Hardware is ever faster, and bandwidth ever greater and less expensive. ...

There are two factors at play here, server load and client responsiveness. Most of us don’t need to worry too much about the former, these techniques judicuously applied may help the latter - at the cost of increased maintainance. It’d be interesting to see benchmarks.