Full versus relative URLs

Here's a question related to my last post. When specifying a link in a HTML file (like to the css or an image file), there are two ways of doing it. One is to simply include the relative path to the file (relative to the doc root), like: /graphics/my_portrait.gif Or you can include the full URL, like: http://example.com/graphics/my_portrait.gif My casual observation seems to indicate that the former will load faster than the latter. But has anyone done any benchmarking on it? Paul -- Paul M. Foster