In reply to Pedro Mendonça.

The loading of an Avatar, profile pic, Gravatar, whatever you want to call it is something basic. When your site has a crap load of users and a requirement is to have an Avatar, PP, Gravatar, etc...it screws up your site specially with 35GB that adds to the size of other files (specially when a site has been around for around 15+ years. Every GB matters. I can't block the gravatars/avatars. If we were to switch to local...size does matter.