texture loading times for plsm

Good afternoon all,
I'm new to ogre and I was wondering about a couple things.

Plsm2 loads information about a terrain page as bitmaps?
It doesn't create a mesh and load that?

Are all the textures for the terrain pages in separate files?

If I have a large number of pages then I'll have a really
large number of texture files. Is there any support for loading
parts of textures from a bitmap without loading the entire
thing? (I know on lossy compression bitmap storage methods
that's not possible, but on some lossless formats you can
easily calculate where a certain pixel is within the file).

I was looking at the texture class and I see it has support for mipmaps
but I didn't see anything else.

I just did some tests to satisfy my curiosity and it's MUCH
faster to load 1000 chunks from a large file than the same
sized chunks from separate files.

Thanks!

It only uses the images as heightmap data (pluggable in plsm3 instead). And when you really want the thing distibuted then you should package up all the pages it creates into a zip file (uncompressed if you really want as well) so that they load faster, and they really will as well. Loading multiple files is slower then one, so no, you don't need to load parts.

Thanks!