alt Hacker NewsOne of my more dubious design decisions (7 years ago...) was to inline all my images as base64 (I was originally planning on having only simple diagrams that would compress well, but this is less true now). I like that every page load generates just a single request, and that you can ctrl+s the page without any breakage.
I haven't profiled anything though, it could also be the syntax highlighting being slow (it generates quite a soup of HTML tags).
A trick I used to use is to check during my custom build step whether the image is under 1k, and inline it if so, otherwise add its hash to the url and add a preload to the html header. I'm trying to get back to that in my latest custom build tool, but it's a gradual process to evolve it to that point properly.