It's the request, stupid!

Just tripped over a nifty article 'Optimizing Page Load Time' that suggests that thinking about HTTP makes a great deal of sense when thinking about performance.

As an example, here's one of the cookies on the site that I work on:

SMIDENTITY=0gzinsuUJJp+/tRSC5ZaV0WudjvPIRSZc06S2wfBFp39qMk3IbwLjlr1yo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;

Now multiply that times the 44 http requests it takes to load one our most popular pages! That's 30K worth of cookies! sweet!