Wayne Shea and Tenni Theurer have continued their performance series by delving into the iPhone and its poor little cache.

I always wonder why the cache is so small. It is typical Apple to not allow an expert mode where you can tweak it. I would rather have a few less songs and have a large cache. But, Steve knows best

The end result of the article is that you should follow this ideal rule:

Reduce the size of each component to 25 Kbytes or less for optimal caching behavior

Given that the wireless network speed on iPhone is limited and the browser cache is cleared across power cycle, it is even more important to make fewer HTTP requests to achieve good performance than in the desktop world. To reduce the number of HTTP requests, Safari on iPhone supports image map, CSS sprites, inline images and inline CSS images. Take advantage of the browser cache whenever possible. If an external component can be shared across multiple pages in the site, remember that each individual component has to be smaller than 25 KB to be cacheable. Also, the maximum cache limit of all components is 475 - 500 KB. Minify all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML. For components that aren’t shared across multiple pages, consider making them inline.

This of course is quite painful if you like to package JavaScript in One Large File for other performance reasons, or if you use a library that is larger than 25KB!

The iPhone can tell us a bunch of things about a site. If I go to TechCrunch for example, it drives me batty as it does a bunch of JavaScript to load in the CrunchBase widgets, and the iPhone keeps thinking it is loading. The blue bar keeps going, and the browser isn’t as responsive. I hate those Crunchbase widgets