Found (via Digg) this very interesting article about how to optimise the delivery of webpages, written by a Google Geek.
http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/

I am familiar with most of them at a superficial level, having a while ago, read an equivalent article from a Yahoo Geek about how they optimised their webpages.

I was particuarly interested though in this article as it explains, with graphs - the improvements to be had from multiple hostnames on webservers.

I already tend to use Gzip on my main websites and am going to be engaging in a total rebuild of the main buisiness website early next year - right down to a complete new server and installation.

I will keep this article on file as it makes sense to split out my static and dynamic content and images into seperate hostnames to speed up delivery.

One other idea I saw a while ago for websites with a lot of small images was to actually serve a single large image containing all the components - then use CSS to crop the “master image” for each use so that only the required part was visible.

That is a great way to cut down the multiple HTTP header request overhead to a single request. While not relevent for my websites, which tend to be graphics light - I thought it was a very interesting idea.