Overcoming the 2 connection limit in browsers

The HTTP 1.1 protocol dictates that browsers cannot make more than 2 connections per domain name. This limitation can cause slow page loads for pages containing a lot of images or other references to external resources.
To overcome this limitation, we can create sub-domains and serve other static content from these sub-domains, so that the browser can create extra 2 connections for each sub-domain.
This trick is explained in the following links:

http://brainspl.at/articles/2006/12/29/speed-up-page-loads
http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/

Actually the above technique is only useful if there are a lot of external resources that need to be loaded by the page. HTTP 1.1 also brought in the concept of HTTP pipelining. This means that over those two connections the browser can send the requests back-to-back before even before receiving a single response. This completely eliminates the dead-time between getting back the last packet of the previous request and then sending the next request. Instead, all the requests are queued at the server, which sends out responses as fast as TCP/IP would allow. If HTTP pipelining is enabled, then the page load speed improves dramatically.

But unfortunately, HTTP pipelining is disabled by default in IE/Firefox- bcoz not all proxies and servers support it still. To enable pipelining in Firefox type "about:config" in Firefox's location bar and enable the "network.http.pipelining" preference.