It isn't weighted properly you are correct, however it is a good guideline to cover your bases. I appreciate the tips, but at the moment we have pretty much al

It isn't weighted properly you are correct, however it is a good guideline to cover your bases. I appreciate the tips, but at the moment we have pretty much all of your points covered - We are currently using asset hosts (assets0..assets3.revzilla.com) (Rails provides this functionality out of the box with 2.0) - All static content IS served by nginx, only the rails requests are being served by mongrel. All static assets are also sent with the appropriate cache headers - css sprites are used sparingly where appropriate, however they are not a silver bullet, and you run into cross browser issues pretty quickly (namely safari) - We are working on reducing the number of images at the moment. In general I would rather have a site which is true to the original design and then optimize from there, rather then cutting corners early on.