>It's true that delivering them in parallel may in some cases reduce the actual download time, but given the small file sizes Apple is serving, the connection overhead (TCP handshake, HTTP headers, slow start, ...) just makes it worse. Most browsers (especially mobile ones) aren't even going to download more than 4-6 files at a time, since they're not using domain sharding.
So what I'm wondering is if you target that 4-6 connection limit, if you get all your js files to load in one connection group can you benefit from the parallel downloading while not blocking anything? Like this: http://i.imgur.com/iuriZ.png
Seems to me like the handshake issue goes away if all the connections are made at once, and you're able to cache files more efficiently. If you make a change to one or two files you can just invalidate those caches rather than the cache of your single mega file. Just some thoughts.
So what I'm wondering is if you target that 4-6 connection limit, if you get all your js files to load in one connection group can you benefit from the parallel downloading while not blocking anything? Like this: http://i.imgur.com/iuriZ.png
Seems to me like the handshake issue goes away if all the connections are made at once, and you're able to cache files more efficiently. If you make a change to one or two files you can just invalidate those caches rather than the cache of your single mega file. Just some thoughts.