Do images embedded in base64 CSS cause a request to the server?

Question

Client side optimization

Good afternoon, I inserted pictures in CSS in base64, in the hope that due to this there will be no extra request to the server for the picture, but the https://tools.pingdom.com tool shows that there is a request. What could be the problem, where is my jamb?

Answer 1

Your problem is that you are misinterpreting this report. It shows you that 0 bytes are requested from the server and it takes 0 seconds of time. (Also, there is no drop-down menu next to the images in data:image that shows additional information about the request.) That is, nothing is requested from the server.

Answer 2

A request to the server is not called, but the space is taken up by 33% more than the original ones (due to base64 encoding, where every 3 bytes are replaced by 4 ascii characters).
And besides this, they are not written to the cache separately (only together with the document in which they are located).
To be honest, I don’t really understand why SEOs are so eager to reduce the number of HTTP requests if servers and browsers have long been able to keep-alive, which allows using one HTTP connection for many requests.