Where The Bandwidth Goes

An anonymous reader writes "An often overlooked fact about network bandwidth utilization is that the bandwidth consumed on networks is more than the sum of the data exchanged at the highest level; it's data+overhead+upkeep. In the early 90's I worked for a large multi-national company whose software engineering department had a transatlantic x.25 circuit connection to it's European engineering headquarters. It was necessary that the connection be 'on' 24x7 due to the spanning of a large number of time zones, disparate working hours and tight contractual requirements. Very large data transfers were sometimes operationally essential. But the financial people used to scream constantly about the circuit costs (charged per packet, IIRC) of several thousand dollars/month. The sys admin realized that if he just reduced the frequency of keep-alives, he could shave something like 10% off the monthly bill. This article points out that p2p applications are greater bandwidth hogs than one might think because of the foregoing and more - they also search, accept pushed advertising and do other transactions that are transparent to most users, but add up. I doubt that developers of those free p2p applications have gave much thought to efficiency. This will be no surprise to many of you, but helps explain why ISP's rushing to put caps on transfers."

Comments

Optimize html

[Winterblink]

I wonder how much bandwidth could be saved annually if people who developed webpages maybe optimized their html a little better? Removing extraneous spacings, simplifying form field namings ("fn" instead of "FirstName"), that kind of thing. Especially sites that get insane amounts of traffic. You know, like Slashdot. :)

Re:Optimize html

[J'raxis]

<paragraph> Would you rather write HTML like <emphasis>this</emphasis>? </paragraph>

<paragraph> Sure, &open-quotation-mark; TLAs &close-quotation-mark; may be annoying to read, but they are certainly OK to use if they are understandable enough. </paragraph>

</hypertext-markup-language>

Re:I doubt it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I visit a web page using my cable modem, I feel a pang of guilt. By visiting a web page, I:

• drive up bandwidth costs for the webmaster that are not covered by advertising
• consume my ISP's bandwidth
• consume shared bandwidth, slowing down my neighbor's computer slightly.

Bandwidth is a finite resource which we should all conserve. One day, eventually, the Internet will run out of bandwidth.

Maintenence required to optimize bandwith

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Internet Cleanup Day is so important!

Where the all bandwith goes? It is easy

[tandr]

Ready?

Slashdot.org and traffic redirected from its links.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post was kind of ho-hum, but the following part of the argument caught my attention:

Timothy has obviously never talked to a P2P developer in his life.

Again, wow. One would need to search far and wide, even on Slashdot, to find another example of such absolutely astonishing cluelessness. The parent poster has obviously never figured out that comments in italics are part of the submission from a reader, and editors' comments (if any) are in normal face after the italicized text ;)