Unless you're talking about very large image sizes ( >200k ) and very low bandwidth; latency is a bigger timesuck, even with pipelined requests. Not to say tha

Unless you're talking about very large image sizes ( >200k ) and very low bandwidth; latency is a bigger timesuck, even with pipelined requests. Not to say that you shouldn't minimize images, but that's less of a concern than minimizing the number of requests.