Images load much slower than before (but they're still coming from the cache)

[easytoremember123]

Until a week ago, I would be able to visit a site that has 200 small
images in one page and these images would download almost
instantaneously when I visited the page. Now, it starts a countdown on
the lower-left part of the screen (200 elements remaining... 199
elements remaining...). It takes 10 seconds to put the images back on
the screen. IE is obviously getting the images from the cache, because
I am able to look at the byte transfers while this is going on and it
hardly loads anything from the internet while the image loading process
is taking place.

[One odd thing: I erased the internet cache under Options in IE, and it
gave me the impression that it was still loading from the cache the
next time I opened the webpage (after a reboot). I could easily be
mistaken about this, I'm mentioning it just in case, I'd have to
recheck to make sure that's what really happened.]

 

[easytoremember123]

A few follow up statistics.

It took 33 seconds to load the images on the page. 72 KB download and
105 KB upload. I have broadband 256/128 so this should have taken 10
seconds tops, not 33. Perhaps I was confused with how "instantaneous"
it used to be, but it's definitely a lot slower now than before. Then
again, maybe it did take just 2 seconds to load the page. All I know is
that it was a lot faster than it is now.

[the 200 images are roughly 3-4 KB each, so together they would be a
700 KB download. It's definitely not downloading the images again,
that's for sure.]

 

[easytoremember123]

Some important corrections to what I stated above.

I ran a test of the loading of the page.

It took 33 seconds (not 10 as I said above). The page has 200 images
which total about 700 KB. It definitely did not load them again. It's
getting the images from the cache.

It downloaded/uploaded much more than I suspected: about 75 KB download
and about 100 KB upload. With my broadband connection, the upload part
should have taken 10 seconds at the most, maybe just 7.

I may have been off on just how instantaneous the loading of the page
used to be, but it is definitely a lot slower now than before.