Funny how I made a couple of busy sites faster recently by taking them off CDN and just moving them to a faster, better configured server instead (that ironically was less expensive). All the CDN in the world would not have made them as fast as they are now.
Unless your site is heavily image based, I simply do not understand CDN for static content.
If you are trying to trick browsers into accepting more connections, first ask yourself why your site is so poorly designed that it needs so many connections - then if necessary use additional domains pointing to your own servers.
A good CDN provides "close" (network latency wise) servers so if there are 30 assets to be loaded, most are done over a 10 ms hop, not a 60 ms hop. Get a complex page with 100+ assets, or try to serve it to another continent and the difference is even more impressive.
Also if you're running a "busy" site off one server, it may not be busy enough to warrant a CDN's traffic off-loading perk. When you start talking about thousands and tens of thousands of requests per second, being able to off-load 80% of those requests makes a huge difference in how much hardware you need to deal with locally.
So say 50 elements. With a 50ms difference that's 2.5 seconds of total time. Most browsers will do 2-4 simultaneous connections, so let's say 4, that's still over 1/2 second faster page load. Now put that end user in Europe or Africa, and you're looking at 200-500 ms latency per call, versus 10 ms. You can see how the math works.
Assets loaded on some of your recently submitted URLs:
Strong upvote for defending your argument with researched examples.
I guess I am old school, I'd never serve that many elements on initial page load, CDN or not, that's crazy.
Each additional DNS lookup can add up to 2 seconds if it's a cold cache-miss.
Most modern browsers/servers use pipelining so it's not a 50ms connect each time.
Different continent I might understand the desire. But I have a server in VA that can serve western Europe at 75-100ms connect time, which is not horrible.
Unless your site is heavily image based, I simply do not understand CDN for static content.
If you are trying to trick browsers into accepting more connections, first ask yourself why your site is so poorly designed that it needs so many connections - then if necessary use additional domains pointing to your own servers.