combining files should make a big difference, as I said, at the moment there are 149 http requests.

I know it shouldn't be benchmarked against the likes of wordpress because they are completely different but at the end of the day most of our clients don't understand that and you can't expect them to. Really it is about user experience, if that is a bad one well then something is majorly wrong.

I have clients on ADSL2+ saying it is taking over a minute to load the cms. These clients are easily pulling a mb a second. The 1mb download is nothing, most connections can handle that in seconds, it is how it is delivered.

For example, we could Mod Tiny MCE to load all the image from one gif sheet rather than 36 requests those images make on loading the cms. Even better, remove Tiny MCE form the load as it isn't needed until you want to edit content.

I had some spare time today to have a playing around with the cms in an effort to speed it up for a client who has been bugging me to do something about it.

I decided to follow my thoughts on combining files to reduce the amount of http requests.

So I combined all the js and css in the LeftAndMain.php controller into single js and css files.
This has yielded fantastic results. I have reduced the load time for a SS 2.2.1 site from 1 minute and 50 seconds to just 20 seconds with this simple change.

Obviously I have come across a couple of js & css errors but nothing can't be resolved.

So if anyone else has been having problems with cms load times I think this will be your best bet. Simply just reduce the http requests.