Now, I may be wrong in this, but here's my thoughts. If the requests are asynchronous, yes, more requests will be much worse over long distances. However, as you see here http://i.imgur.com/iuriZ.png, Chrome, FF, and IE since 8 (6,7 limited to 2 connections I think) will establish multiple simultaneous connections to each domain serving assets. So what I'm saying is that the best strategy might be serving ~4 or 5 JS and CSS files, with likely to change files separated from unlikely to change files. Serving different asset groups from different domains would speed this up even more. Just some (disconnected) thoughts.
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Now, I may be wrong in this, but here's my thoughts. If the requests are asynchronous, yes, more requests will be much worse over long distances. However, as you see here http://i.imgur.com/iuriZ.png, Chrome, FF, and IE since 8 (6,7 limited to 2 connections I think) will establish multiple simultaneous connections to each domain serving assets. So what I'm saying is that the best strategy might be serving ~4 or 5 JS and CSS files, with likely to change files separated from unlikely to change files. Serving different asset groups from different domains would speed this up even more. Just some (disconnected) thoughts.
Also, I'm sure Apple has servers in Asia.