Q:

Does the use of multiple DIVs affect page performance?

I am new to the world of coding as well as CSS. I have put together a page however am unsure if I may have overused the div tag and if it would affect the performance of the page as well as if I should be clearing the float as its own div tag e.g.
#content {

        clear: both;

    }

I have included the entire code below
 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />

        <meta name="keywords" content="" />
        <meta name="description" content="" />
        <meta name="author" content="" />

        <title>Example</title>

        <base href="" />

        <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="" />

        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="" />

        <style type="text/css" media="all">

        * {

            margin: 0;
            padding: 0;

        }

        body {

            font-family: arial, verdana, sans-serif;
            font-size: 0.8em;

        }

        #wrapper {

            /* background-image: url('images/bg-inner-page.gif'); */
            background-color: #808080;
            height: 200px;

        }

        #innerwrapper {

            width: 960px;
            overflow: auto;

        }

        #header {

        }

        #logo {

            float: left;
            margin-top: 20px;
            margin-left: 50px;
            background-color: gray;

        }

        #topnav {

            float: left;
            margin-top: 50px;
            margin-left:30px;
            color: #ffffff;

        }

        #topnav ul {

            word-spacing: 10px;

        }

        #topnav ul li {

            list-style-type: none;
            display: inline;

        }

        #content {

            clear: both;

        }

        #innercontent {

            float: left;
            margin-top: 100px;
            margin-left: 225px;
            margin-bottom: 20px;
            width: 400px;

        }

        #rightcol {

            float: left;
            margin-top: 125px;
            margin-left: 50px;
            width: 200px;

        }

        #footer {

            background-color: gray;

        }

        </style>

    </head>

    <body>
        <div id="wrapper">
            <div id="innerwrapper">

                <div id="header">
                    <div id="logo"><img src="images/logo.gif" width="150" height="96" alt="logo" /></div>

                    <div id="topnav">
                        <ul>
                            <li>home</li>
                            <li>about</li>
                            <li>browse</li>
                            <li>faq</li>
                            <li>contact</li>
                        </ul>
                    </div>

                </div>

                <div id="content">
                    <div id="innercontent">

                        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, at elementum neque vestibulum sollicitudin semper neque, vitae metus. Nibh ligula mi. Faucibus rutrum elit turpis, nec congue quam ipsum felis neque et, wisi amet, architecto eros congue. Maecenas suspendisse tellus arcu eget pharetra, rhoncus aenean sapien morbi nec arcu, vivamus aliquet lorem amet at, vestibulum purus sociis varius id. Imperdiet id magnis turpis beatae aliquet, vestibulum dolor nec eget eu cras lobortis, vel rerum, risus sed et, libero et non eros commodo. Taciti eu leo sollicitudin malesuada, nibh duis amet aenean, odio aptent ultrices. Tristique morbi nunc ullamcorper ut curabitur. Et a in ut sem varius, sem rutrum vehicula sem sed, at diam amet erat vel. Et sit in ante felis vitae sit.

                        Quam eget sed elit natoque velit, enim mauris mauris urna, integer amet tellus illo ipsum, dolor fermentum cursus enim mollis tristique porttitor. Non dignissim. Sit ligula leo tincidunt, justo ut ut placerat quisque non, risus nonummy. Ultrices mauris congue aliquam aliquam felis, at placerat, amet vestibulum dictumst pellentesque iaculis risus. Sem sed impedit nullam ultrices lorem aliquam, nulla tellus consequatur in ornare magna. Viverra amet pede in in ornare eu, id arcu. Justo mus suspendisse praesent et, amet mattis convallis ullamcorper felis, fermentum nibh at ac, ullamcorper ipsum auctor et maecenas, aliquam molestiae in qui. Massa elit suspendisse penatibus molestie libero dolor, non leo vitae, sollicitudin a, platea tristique iaculis, tortor augue non est. Ante rutrum quis pellentesque lacinia convallis non, vestibulum nibh nunc luctus nibh a, in amet, iaculis dui ornare pede laoreet eu. Cursus integer vehicula quis, justo eget purus mattis donec vestibulum nunc, nunc vel eros lectus.
                    </div>
                </div>

                <div id="rightcol"><img src="http://htmldog.com/r/logo.gif" width="140" height="91" alt="html" /></div>
            </div>

            <div id="footer">footer</div>
        <div>
    </body>
    </html>

A:

Don't worry about performance due to many divs. Unless you use hundreds of divs (e.g. to simulate rounded borders on some browsers), the bottleneck for webpage is and will be the inet connection.

A:

Not at all.
That is, relatively, a small amount of divs.
Browser rendering performance is extremely impressive these days, so the major bottleneck will be the speed of the Internet connection downloading the page.
The smaller you can make your page the faster it will download and render.

