background-image load or display delays even though cached in IE7

I have a seperator li which has a background image, in an expanded tree 开发者_StackOverflow社区menu, it may appear several times using the css:

.simpleTree .line {
    background:url("/images/Css/gridLine.gif") no-repeat 0 0;

Even tho it is cached (from previous instances), there is still a slight delay in IE7 (~500 - 1sec) before all the background images fires up. Is there a better way to do this or make it quicker?

As far as I can tell the delay shouldn't be because of a single gif image. Check your site with YSlow or PageSpeed. Maybe some other content is blocking your image to appear fast (like javascript execution).

There are some things that you can try. You can try to reduce the size of your image and than in the CSS use the TAG "repeat-x" or "repeat-y".

In some cases, .gif's are not the best type to display images, you can try saving your image in diferent formats and see if they get smaller.

Best Regards