Queued, Concatenated, and Gzipped Assets with the Zend Framework

Linking assets to your templates and layouts is always a mine field. Every person has a different way of doing it and if it is done poorly, it can adversely affect the load time of your website, particularly if you have lots of websites. It’s helpful to understand how the http protocol fetches things like stylesheets and javascript files while it’s loading your page. In order to alleviate traffic for any individual server, a browser is limited to only so many concurrent requests to the same host. I do not recall what that limit is on each browser but I’m sure google does but in any case, if your site is of significant scope, chances are, you are going to need more assets than your browser can pull in at once. If you don’t believe me, install the yslow extension for firefox and run it on a page with many assets and you will see what i’m talking about.