Javascript Options

[none345678]

Is it better to have one big JS file or to link to them separately?

[mipadi]

Unless your site is getting something on the order of 10,000+ hits/day, it doesn't really matter.

But if you're asking purely for intellectual masturbation:

If you have one big file, your web browser will make 1 request -- but it'll have to wait for the entire file to download.
If you have a bunch of small files, your web browser can request them in parallel (to a limit -- a browser will only open a limited number of connections to a given web server).
Either way, the JavaScript files may be parsed one at a time anyway.

If you do have a really high-traffic site, you'll gain a bigger performance boost by gzip-compressing your JavaScript (and CSS) files. Also, if you're using jQuery, use Google's loader or URL to request the jQuery script, since your visitor's browser will likely already have it cached.

[none345678]

Unless your site is getting something on the order of 10,000+ hits/day, it doesn't really matter.

But if you're asking purely for intellectual masturbation:

If you have one big file, your web browser will make 1 request -- but it'll have to wait for the entire file to download.
If you have a bunch of small files, your web browser can request them in parallel (to a limit -- a browser will only open a limited number of connections to a given web server).
Either way, the JavaScript files may be parsed one at a time anyway.

If you do have a really high-traffic site, you'll gain a bigger performance boost by gzip-compressing your JavaScript (and CSS) files. Also, if you're using jQuery, use Google's loader or URL to request the jQuery script, since your visitor's browser will likely already have it cached.

Yeah, I was mostly asking for future reference and had general curiosity and couldn't find really a straight answer on google. Thank you kind sir.

What I am working on now is just a 1 page portfolio so I had a feeling it wouldn't matter.

[mipadi]

Yeah, I was mostly asking for future reference and had general curiosity and couldn't find really a straight answer on google. Thank you kind sir.

Sure.

For reference, the site I manage gets about 40,000 hits/day. That's not an extremely high volume of traffic, but the visits are very "bursty" -- sometimes we get a couple thousand hits per hour for a few hours. We have many JS and CSS files, and we just use gzip compression; on the HTML side, we use memcached to aggressively cache HTML templates and minimize database calls. It works fairly well -- we run the entire site off of a dual-core server instance.