There are still some gains from combining the files, as it will mean less headers will go over the wire, and you'd still want to minify them so that there were less total bits, but the gains aren't going to be as big as they used to be.
At Udemy ~90% of our visitors have SPDY3 or better (tech-savvy audience). Our JS needs an overhaul and the timing is great for a rethink on how we deliver it.
We're looking at optimising for those users and no longer bundling our JS and CSS. We need to test it further because we can't simply flick a switch and flick it back if it doesn't work out, we'll need to move away from Fastly to somewhere that has SPDY first.
I'm curious as to how javascript engines perform with one hundred files multiplexed VS one giant file.
When you can spend longer up front optimizing the concatenation, minification, and compression, you can amortize that additional cost across every request and still make important incremental gains.
A bit saved is a bit earned.
> A bit saved is a bit earned.
So don't send bits the user probably won't need? :P
Surely good for both your bandwidth bills, and the end user experience. The less work your users have to do, the better, especially when it comes to mobile devices.
Given how awful ad serving architecture is these days for smaller publishers (chains of javascripts and iframes), I don't anticipate this being fixed for quite a while.