Hosting images separately to html

Is there gain running lighttpd on same machine as apache?

[billuk]

I have a dedicated server with 3 IP addresses. I serve an average mix of images/html (whatever average is!) using Apache.

I was wondering whether it would make sense to separate the images onto a different subdomain and setup lighttpd (or similar) on a separate IP address to serve the images. So Apache and lighttpd would be running on the same server.

Does this sound like a stupid idea? Is there likely to be any benefit of this setup as opposed to serving all from Apache?

[MatthewHSE]

All I know about it is that if you serve your images from a different domain (even a subdomain will work) then IE will fetch them at the same time it's fetching the rest of the page, resulting in faster complete pageloads.

[billuk]

Thanks that's very interesting, I didn't realise that