Repeating website background image - size vs speed

Question

I was wondering if anyone has done any tests with background images. We normally create a background that repeats at least in one direction (x or y or both).

Answer 1

I found out that there may be a huge difference in the rendering performance of the browser, if you have a background-image with width of 1px and repeating it. It's better to have a background-image with slightly larger dimensions. So a image with a width of 100px performs much better in the browser. This especially comes into play when you use a repeated background-image in a draggable layer on your website. The drag-performance is pretty bad with an often-repeated background-image.