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?

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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).

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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