Actually, it's a pretty massive file. It appears to be an uncompressed BMP… Keeping it lossless, a comparable PNG would be about 20% of the current filesize. High quality JPEG compression would be lossy but not noticeably so, and would be about 7% of the current filesize.

Once they're cached, they load quickly of course, but as I look at graphs, on the first load the two BMPs take longer to load than everything else on the page combined, simply because (again, looking at it all on a graph) they're huge compared to every other file that's being loaded.

That's not to say that a slow connection wouldn't contribute, as well as the general funkiness of the server right now, but the image files are, well, big.

I'm going with "slow connection", 'cause they're loading fine for me! :) But the files we use now on Tanooki ARE a little bigger (we have more room now on the page to do so), so bear that in mind.

Minimal work, maximum number of pixels and filesize. Or was the slow load caused by a slow connection?