webpage HTTP Requests

How many is too many?

[cgcody]

I was just working on a small site that has around 20 images just for layout; buttons, rounded corners, etc. Though it seems a little extreme, I'm not really worried about it at this point. I'm just wondering, mostly out of curiosity, what others think about this. Is there a suggested limit to stay under? Do any of you have a personal limit?

I am aware of the websiteoptimization analyzer, by the way. :)

[trillianjedi]

Is there a suggested limit to stay under?

The fewer the better.

That said, back in the real World, I wouldn't concern yourself too much with the number of images as long as they're very small and your webserver is well tuned*.

1. Ensure you're using the height and width tags on the images, and you're requesting that the browser cache them.

2. If you're using Apache, try experimenting with the keep-alive feature so that TCP/IP connections are not pulled down and up again on each request. I'm sure IIS has a similar feature but I don't know what it's called.

3. Ideally, run a second webserver instance just to serve up the images (on a different IP or port), cut down and streamlined just for that job.

Fundamentally the real test is human though - it's either usable or too slow. Number of images (or http objects) will affect the speed of the server and in some cases dictate how many simultaneous visitors you can have.

Once again though, back in the real World, RAM and server processor horsepower are both dirt cheap these days. If you really get stuck and start to notice performance issues, offload the images to a dedicated image server.

Do any of you have a personal limit?

I tend to approach this from the other direction. I build the page that I want my visitors to see, as efficiently as I can but without being crazy about efficiency. If it runs too slow, or gets too busy, I'll offload some of the work to a second server.

TJ

* - There may be some accessibility issues that you need to consider, especially if your site is going to be viewed on mobile devices.

[cgcody]

Thanks for the reply, I'll take everything you said under consideration.

As for accessibility, I do try to keep my sites within the Section 508 standards, and all layout/design is done via CSS.

Thanks again. :)