Along with other's suggestions, take a look at a kernel level httpd for static content (Linux has a nice one), or move it to another server and reference it like <img src="http://images.foo.com/gif1.gif">.

Just decreasing the number of things that Apache, or the same machine has to serve, will help your performance and scalability.

Also, always including the width and height attributes in your image tags will help the 'percieved' speed at which the page loads, because if the browser knows the size of the images it can render the page while it is downloading the images.

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"