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'd put money on the bottleneck being the image download rather than the rendering engine doing the tiling, so go for the 1 pixel wide option.

Also the 24-bit PNG is redundant since you're still only getting 8 bits per channel (red, green and blue).