Interestng article on optimizing page load times using some unexpected behaviors. These would probable not be useful for any proejcts I work on, but two interesting results: When serving many small objects you might actually bottleneck the page load on the users' upload bandwidth and using four hostnames instead of one for your objects give you more concurrent connections. More specifics: "By default, IE allows only two outstanding connections per hostname when talking to HTTP/1.1 servers or eight-ish outstanding connections total. Firefox has similar limits. Using up to four hostnames instead of one will give you more connections."

And: "Most DSL or cable Internet connections have asymmetric bandwidth. . . . Ratios of download to upload bandwidth are commonly in the 5:1 to 20:1 range. This means that for your users, a request takes the same amount of time to send as it takes to receive an object of 5 to 20 times the request size. Requests are commonly around 500 bytes, so this should significantly impact objects that are smaller than maybe 2.5k to 10k. This means that serving small objects might mean the page load is bottlenecked on the users' upload bandwidth, as strange as that may sound."