Reimers.dk

I'm going to need to display an "obscene" amount of markers. Right now I'm looking at 500 as an upper limit. 

I read the post on this topic but I'm curious as to what effect the marker itself has on performance.

I've read that the default icon is anything but optimized for performance.

My questions:

1. How can I create the lightest marker possible? Just get the image file size as small as possible?

2. Do I need to use an image for the icon? Can it just be a point?

 Thanks.

If you really need to display 500 markers, then I would suggest using a Silverlight map instead. The problem with Google Maps is that HTML DOM is not optimized for enormous DOM trees. I generally don't recommend displaying more than 100-150 markers. You may want to either reconsider the usability of 500 markers or using a marker clusterer.