Slashdot Mirror
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."
I doubt that you have gave much thought to grammar.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
Hey,
/newtcp/ HTTP/1.1"3 "
I noticed that Slashdot has a nasty bug, which, I imagine is a fault of
Slashcode. On certain occassions, you can find a very interesting Referer
string for some visitiors of pages mentioned on this site. One of such
entries:
63.XXX.XXX.175 - - [11/Sep/2002:18:13:33 +0200] "GET
200 33541 "http://slashdot.org/?unickname=dXXg&passwd=rXXXX
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826"
[lcamtuf.coredump.cx]
Go figure. This does not seem to be a consistent pattern, of thousands
hits from Slashdot only about 15-20 were like that today, so it seems like
a specific condition have to be met, yet it's not that uncommon - I'd
guess it happens right after you login and click on the link. I did not
investigate it too much, but it seems to me that Slashcode is fairly
popular and used in quite a few places - and that's a nice example of why
GET shouldn't be used for forms. This is based exclusively on the real
world observation of this pattern.
I gave Slashdot a short notice because it does not really matter how fast
you patch it - once public, people can grep their webserver logs for past
entries anyway.
--
Michal Zalewski
Back in the heyday of "X.25" networks, there were a lot of illegitimate users. There was inadequate technology to protect and track.
It is rumored that there are accounts on public x.25 networks, belonging to large corporations, that have worked for over 13 years.
If people learned the difference between "it's" and "its", the unneeded apostrophes alone would save about 10% of the bandwidth that Slashdot uses.
This is just one example. There are others.
"Pump "Britney Spears" into Kazaa's search engine...
yeah, i wouldn't mind pumping britney spears right about now...
just think of p2p as those pains you had in your legs when you were 14.
Oh, I thought those were just due to constant masturbation.
It was a pretty bad commercial: It never once made me want to go buy AIDS.
And why are YOU replying as an AC?
If only the RIAA was in charge of ISPs.. they could distribute music cheaply and reap the benefits of raping us on Bandwidth usage.. wow new business model!