Preload a lot of tiny pics

I'm thinking about how to approach the problem at hand. There's a flash movie t开发者_运维知识库hat requires a lot of relativly small images and I'm trying to optimize the time it takes for them to be preloaded.

One thing I've considered it turning on KeepAlive in Apache on the server side. That works. But my mind still wonders if there's anything else ;-)

So, what other approaches I may try? Is there a way to compress all those images and then unpack on client side?

I have full control on both server and client side. Can even try installing something other than Apache. Cache is not an option because it already works and it's first time loading that bothers me here.

You could try to use image sprites instead of separate images. Here's a good article about using them in CSS, but the same technique can be applied in Flash.