I'm working on a large project, where we have just started using PMD with
Hudson. There are thousands of issues that show in our PMD reports which we are
working on lowering.

The problem is on the pages that show the relative count of issues by
package/type/etc. with red/yellow bars. Each one of these bars makes a separate
image request, which causes the page overall to load incredibly slowly.

I would like to suggest using HTML DIV elements to represent these bars, instead
of images. Each DIV would have it's style width set proportionate to the number
of issues in that category. Since you could embed these "graphics" into the
HTML, all of the image requests for the bars could be avoided.

If using DIVs is not an acceptable solution, then another suggestion that might
help with image requests would be if the request was given the same URL for the
same image, so the browser could utilize caching. For example, it seems that
every 1 unit yellow bar requires a separate request, even though the images are
identical. If all 1 unit yellow bar images had the same URL, they could share
the same request/browser image cache.