Inline JavaScript Experiment

[calumfodder]

I've just noticed that I can't see the siteJavascript.cfm resource on either of the results pages for Exhibit A (JS as external)....in fact it turns up in Exhibit B (JS as inline)..so I think the results pages are under the wrong exhibits, which has also led to some confusion.

So are we looking at the Fully loaded time metric or the Document complete metric? I would argue that the Document Complete metric is more valid in this situation.
The external JS is being downloaded in parallel with an external CSS from your cdn subdomain, in fact it takes less time to download than the css file. You are downloading images from sharded image subdomains in parallel to these 2 resources being served from the cdn subdomains. So I am not seeing any blocking behaviour in particular. I think the differences in the times can be related more strongly to a variance in the response time of your server rather than a variance in the behaviour of the inlined/external JS.

Also you are using the same IP for a number of your domains (CDN and images), you could try the nested CNAMEs DNS hack to cut down the number of DNS requests for colocated domains from 4 to 1.