All the handshaking involved in setting up the connection is responsible for most of the loading time of any page with lots of small icons.
I made a measurement how long it takes for me to fetch the GNN home page. I traced the packet-flow using tcpdump.
I have made three postscript plots displaying
Please get the files and notice that there are a lot of pauses where nothing is transferred.For a better performace it is vitally important to reuse http-connection.