Page load time:

This page contains 24 images that each take 1 second to download. You can fire up a packet sniffer to see how many parallel downloads your browser supports, but you might be able to infer that by dividing the number of images by the load time. For example,

• if the page loads in 12 seconds the browser is doing 2 downloads in parallel
• if the page loads in 6 seconds the browser is doing 4 downloads in parallel
• if the page loads in 4 seconds the browser is doing 6 downloads in parallel
• if the page loads in 3 seconds the browser is doing 8 downloads in parallel

Note that these images are done using Keep-Alive (the default in HTTP/1.1), so they are persistent connections. For persistent connections Firefox and IE7 and earlier perform 2 downloads in parallel. (See network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server in Firefox's about:config.) IE8 does 6 downloads in parallel. HTTP/1.0 (non-persistent connections) is different. Firefox does 8 parallel downloads, and IE7 and earlier does 4 parallel downloads. (See network.http.max-connections-per-server in Firefox's about:config.) I'm not sure what IE8 does. It's hard to find HTTP/1.0 these days. AOL still uses it because they believe it makes the page load faster (because of increased parallel downloads.)