Is it worth giving images on the site from subdomains?

Question

Domain name market

Hey!
Newbie question. There is a site with a portfolio of photographers on a rented Hetzner server running CentOS and Apache. On some pages of this site, the number of pictures (both thumbnails and large photos) can reach four to five dozen pieces.

Is it possible to speed up the download of images to users with a wide channel if they are referred to through subdomains (for example, images1.site.com, images2.site.com, etc.) hosted on the same server? If so, what program can measure the difference?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Firefox + Firebug extension (F12 -> Network) will show the load time of everything.

Answer 2

There will be little difference since
1) The browser does not need to pass cookies to this domain
2) Browsers have a limit of 3-5 download threads per domain. Having many subdomains, the browser can load data into a large number of streams.
3) You can view in Firebug the Network panel or in a similar tab in Chrome

Answer 3

Placing on subdomains makes sense only when you need scalability or in order to at least give static without various handlers and compressed with gzip, for example (through the same nginx).
In other cases, it will not give you a speed gain.

Answer 4

Costs. In the event that this server starts to choke on you, you can buy another one at Hetzner, connect it to work with the previous one and distribute pictures from it.
By the way, I would replace Apache with NGINX, or at least put it forward for distributing statics, pictures, because there are statics, the increase would be significant.

Answer 5

You can also speed up the loading of images if you load them as you scroll the page:
www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload/enabled.html

Answer 6

There is a limit on the number of threads, although it seems like not all modern browsers comply with it. So with a large number of large pictures, there will be a win.
But in general, I advise you not to bother with nano-optimization, and it’s better to focus on content (including pictures) and promotion.