Would it make sense to improve pageload speed by serving smaller images from the database rather than make multiple HTTP requests given that the website is PHP driven?
I'm thinking of smaller page design elements, buttons, thumbnails for galleries etc.
The number of HTTP requests remains the same whether the browser loads images from a script that loads image data from a database or regular files. In fact, loading image data from a database rather than static files would probably introduce additional overhead.
If you're looking to reduce the amount of HTTP requests a browser has to make to load your documents, you should look into CSS Sprites.
No. Since:
If you want to make fewer HTTP requests, you can sprite the images, but don't do that with content images (which should have proper <img> elements with alt text).
You would save the overhead from the HTTP, but how would you insert the images in the html? Otherwise you have to still make an HTTP request to get the image.
If you serve the images as byteStream from the DB, you don't let browsers to cache the content. And if you use HTTP requests per image, you let them cache the content, but paying the price to do more requests. You have also to consider the time fetching the images from the DB and the time processing them!.
I think that your best option in this case, is put all the small images in just one file (sprite), and then use CSS to display them. That's what high load sites do. This way you just do one request and get all the images, the browser will cache the file and it will improve your perfomance. The price you pay is that you need to write more CSS but that's just plain text and the same number of files. It's a win-win situation :)
No.
The user isn't directly connected to the database and you can't (well you can but it's so ugly I'm ignoring it) output the image data inside the HTML. They have to be loaded on separate requests.
If you store them in a database, you need something to access the database and then stream it out. It's actually seriously worse than just letting your httpd serve it. If a server hosts it, only the core server and the filesystem get touched. If it's in a database it's the core server, the connector to the language (eg mod_php), the language (eg php), the database connection and the filesystem (which the database is written on).
Keep it simple. Keep it as a file.
If you're drowning in requests:
If you're on Apache consider using a server like lighttpd or nginx. Massively more efficient on static/dynamic mixed environments. You can still keep apache or you can dump it altogether.
Shift your images off to a CDN like S3, Akami, etc. There are plenty of providers and it usually only works out a little bit more expensive than hosting (this is assuming you've got quite a lot of traffic).
It is possible, you can embed image in HTML using Data URI Scheme. But I doubt it will redeem, you will decrease number of HTTP requests, but images can be cached on client, so therefore you will greatly increase length of each response.
But, it will be faster to load those files directly from disc, not from DB.
also you can serve the images from multiple subdomains, so you can have more concurrent HTTP requests which could help speeding up.
There are various ways to improve image performance in a website
Use an alternate domain just for static content. This has two benefits - cookies from your main domain are not sent with each request, and a separate domain gets it's own allocation of connections
Combine images into sprites
Configure caching correctly. Set far future expiry headers. Set the expiry header so that the image is not downloaded between visits to the site. When an image is requested, the ETAG can also be checked and if they match, then a 302 response is returned and the content is not downloaded again.
I don't see why streaming images from a database is going to better than from the file system. Your performance numbers are subjective I suspect because of caching.