In yet another effort to increase loading times on inherently graphic heavy websites we stumbled across an article on sitepoint which details a limitation across all web browsers. The limitation, which is came from a recommendation made in the http standard, states that no more than 2 connections should be made to any one domain name. So if your website has a bunch images, an html file and some css, your browser will only be able to download two of those at a time. This only really becomes a problem if you have lots of images to download- if you have two large files coming down at once, that's all your connections in use, so everything else will have to wait.
You can get round this by setting up a bunch of sub-domains, pointing to your site root, in exactly the same was as the www DNS record- just add these as additional host headers in IIS- we've got images.domain.co.uk, styles.domain.co.uk, etc etc as well as the standard www.domain.co.uk, then you just set your image tags to grab all your images as normal, but substitute the www's for "images"- like wise with your css- set your link tags to reference your css at styles.domain.co.u/css/screen.cssfor example.
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