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HTTP/2 was a very nice improvement, now we don't have the network overhead related to creating multiple connections to download multiple files, and is recommended to stop concatenating JS and CSS files to improve caching, but I'm not sure if from the perspective of I/O, having to read multiple files from hard drive will impact performance.

I don't know if Web servers like Apache or nginx have some RAM caching of frequent files and this avoids I/O overhead and I can stop concatenating and stop worrying about this.

IAmJulianAcosta
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    This answer might be of interest to you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35588692/optimizing-file-cacheing-and-http2/36253257#36253257 – Barry Pollard Apr 21 '16 at 14:32

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No, having to read multiple files from the hard disk won't worsen performance, specially if your are using the current crop of SSD hard-drives. They have amazing performance and thanks to them network bandwidth, SSL and everything else are the bottlenecks.

Also, operating systems automatically cache in RAM recently accessed files, so the feature you would like doesn't need to be built into the web server, because it is already built into the operating system. And this works even if you are using magnetic drives.

There is one thing though. We (at shimmercat.com) have noticed that sometimes compression suffers by having multiple small files instead of a concatenated one. In that sense, it would have been nice if HTTP/2 had included a compression format like SDCH ... But this should matter more for particularly small files than for big files. All in all, I think that the cache benefits for small files are worth it.

dsign
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