Are Web Pages Getting Larger?

An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a large multinational in a remote part of world. Our connectivity to the outside world (the Internet as well as company communications) is all done via a single E1 line - that's 2Mbps. Thousands of users. The company keeps access pretty well screwed down for security reasons, and the fact that our link to the outside world costs almost $300K/year! Our growing problem is Internet traffic. While policing of non-business use is very active, Internet traffic continues to grow. I'm becoming convinced that one of our problems is that average web page size is growing. As more of the world enjoys broadband access, I think web developers have less reason to limit the size of their web pages. Large images, flash animations and other size-increasing content seem increasingly common. Am I right? Can anyone point to a recent study that would support my theory, and help me convince my management that we just plain need more bandwidth?"

Comments

Caching.

[slashkitty]

You could add a local caching proxy server and/or set browsers to cache longer to reduce bandwidth. Have you done an analysis on how much of the traffic is people just pulling up the same pages?