Let me start off by stating that I am an avid gamer.  I enjoy playing games on the Wii, Nintendo DS and on my PC.  Before I commit to purchasing a new game, I usually check out the game’s website to look at screenshots, read up on the story-line, or download a demo.  In the gaming world image is everything.  Looking good can be equated to being fun and enjoyable. 

Sometimes, this can be taken too far.

Take for example, the gaming website (don’t click on the link until after you read the article) The Chronicles of Spellborn.  Dissecting the page source, one can see that this website uses 43 images to render a very nice looking web page; however, Internet Explorer displays on the status bar that 445 images are loading.  Looking deeper at the page source, the image “spacer.gif” is used repeatedly.

Technically, the image count Internet Explorer comes up with is based on the total number of <img> tags in the page source.  When a page loads, Internet Explorer must query the browser cache or web server for each and every image whether it is repeated or not.  Using that many image tags in a web page is can be an incredible resource hog for both the web server and the web site visitor’s browser. 

Using WebWatchBot  with a fast Internet connection to monitor this page for a period of time, the average response time for the main page is 17 seconds to load from start to finish.  Each image is relatively small (1-5KB), but that makes little difference in the total page load time, because only a few of the images can be loaded simultaneously (Internet Explorer and FireFox will load images in separate threads to speed up the process). 

The obvious lesson here is to limit the number of image tags on a page whether they are the same exact image or not.