There is a carousel project, which currently loads all the images upfront, but the size is getting bigger each week. More and more images are being added beyond the original design.
Someone asked me; What is an acceptable web page footprint?
My knee jerk reaction was to suggest lazy-loading of images, but that's not what they asked me.
Your thoughts are appreciated.
Not a straight forward answer, but it really depends on your user base more than anything. The acceptable web page footprint will be completely different between a user base with 80% IE6 users than that of a page where all users use Safari and Chrome.
You can only find out for yourself what you or your client will find acceptable, and the only way to find that out is by testing various scenarios in different environments
Lazy-loading resources is always a good idea. Another good idea is to store static resources on a CDN like Rackspace Cloud (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files) or Amazon S3 (https://s3.amazonaws.com/).
The faster your page loads, the better. 2 seconds is a maximal time for a business site nowadays. Let it load slower - and you lose visitors, who are used to 0.5-1 sec load time. So you need to estimate time needed for the average Joe to load your web page, based on average bandwidth of your target audience. I don't have exact numbers for bandwidth, unfortunately.