[srd]

The main takeaway seems to be: "This is in spite of the fact that the CSS sprite actually requires an extra connection and incurs all the associated connection overhead including TCP slow start!"

However, if the CSS file and sprite reside on the same server, and HTTP/1.1 with keepalives is used, chances are that the sprite will come down a preheated TCP connection (and thus also foregoing an SSL handshake, if fetching via https). The article doesn't actually mention how client and server are set up, and what the base network latency between them is.

It would be nice to see the test results with and without keepalives to see how this influences the results, as well as what the median network latency between client and server were during these tests.