Discussion of various optimizations that can be applied to Magento community and enterprise installations for speed improvements. Techniques include common WPO techniques such as gzip, cache control, CSS spriting, domain sharding, byte code caches, reverse proxies and more. Various steps are applied to an Amazon AWS instance with the results from Webpagetest.org shown afterwards.
Beware the over spriting problem…it is possible to block yourself with CSS here and avoid incremental loading you get with individual images which might be trouble for long latency requests or mobile devices
It couldn’t quite externalize the CSS images automatically, still the performance is a great improvement. This is the common trade off of automated versus by hand approaches…if every 100ms matters you might find it worth it pay to customize