Getting Started with Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner

Concatenation

As with minification, concatenation (or joining) also helps reduce page load time. As per the HTTP 1.1 specification, browsers can only request two files at once (see HTTP 1.1 Pipelining). Although newer browsers have broken this rule and will attempt to load up to six files at once, we will see it is still the cause of slower page load times.

For example, if we open Chrome Developer Tools inside Google Chrome, view the Network tab, then visit the cnn.com website, we see approximately 120 file requests, 40 of which are loading from the cnn.com domain. Hence, even with six files being loaded at once, our browsers still must wait until a slot opens up before they can start downloading the next set of files.

Also, if there are more files ...