speeding up website load using multiple servers/domains

Question

When Yahoo! developer guide says "Deploying your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make your pages load faster from the user's perspective".

And as an explanation I read somewhere, that browsers will load up to 5 things simultaneously from the same domain.

Would a subdomain, for example cdn.example.com be considered a new domain, in the previous statement?

Answer 1

Yahoo: The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel.

Google also says you only need different host names.

This may depend on browser, but I believe they may need to have different IP addresses. All that HTTP spec really says is: "Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server."

So the safest choice is to have different host name AND address.