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I'm not sure and I did not made any kind of test, but here 1.1 seems faster than 1.0. Is this just my impression?

I doubt there could be anything noticeable.
At least, I couldn't think of anything that would give a noticeable boost, but I may have miss some stuff, dunno.

Maybe that shiny new parser is helping

I didn't notice any change. Neither positive nor negative.

probably is just my impression, looking at the bottom of the page I got "Page created in 0,1x seconds" and sometimes 0,05 seconds which is similar to the previous version.

Or maybe my network is working better than usual At 1.0 AM people use to sleep

The svg sprites are certainly going to be faster than the mass of images if a site isn't using http/2

Even if you've inserted caching headers on all the images?  Then they should only require additional transactions on the first page.