This new theme has proven to be much lighter on the server. For overall bandwidth usage on the main page the old theme used 403 KB and the new theme uses 372 KB. That by itself isn’t a very big difference, but the number of requests per page load is where the real savings are. The old theme needed to request 52 objects to build the page (images, CSS, HTML files… etc). The new theme only needs a trim 31 objects. I realize that browser caching will reduce the number of requests after the initial page load, but my server tends to get a lot of first time page loads, and not very many people hanging around and loading lots of pages.
If you would like to test your own site I would highly recommend the Web Page Analyzer site. It details what objects need to be requested to build a page, and gives you tips on how to minimize load times. My biggest hitters for bandwidth are the auto-generated images from Windows Live Writer. For some reason Windows Live Writer insists on using PNG files for the images which tend to be considerably larger than the JPG (and sometimes GIF) equivalents. But, image optimization is a task for another day as I am working on getting some new things out the door this week. Things that I have been meaning to do for quite some time. 
December 3rd, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Great tip Jon, I ran that tool against some of my projects and it seems I’ve got some fat to trim
December 13th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Welcome to the land of Vertigo! (was doing a “vertigo blue theme” search and came across your site - figured I’d drop in)
Cheers.
December 15th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I like the modifications you’ve made to the theme William, looks great!