whats the point??

[dreamwest]

whats the point of using subdomains for images, js etc when you can use .htaccess to cache images

 

just seems like less work to add:

 

<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>

 

instead of creating multiple subdomains

[rhodesa]

caching doesn't affect the first loading of those files though. the reason for a subdomain is that a browser will limit the number of connections to a host (i think it's around 3). By having files spread out over subdomains, you can have that many connections per subdomain, leading to a faster page load.

[trq]

Often subdomains may point to a seperate server as well, thus reducing (or spreading) server load.

[corbin]

To piggyback on thorpe's post, sometimes subdomains not only point to different hardware servers but different software servers too.

 

For example, lighthttpd is used sometimes for serving just static content.  The overhead of one request on lighthttpd can be 1/10 of the size of one under Apache with some modules loaded.  A couple of big sites use this method, but I can't remember any off the top of my head x.x.