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Are Long URLs Wasting Bandwidth?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the waste-away-and-build-a-bigger-pipe dept.

Ryan McAdams writes "Popular websites, such as Facebook, are wasting as much as 75MBit/sec of bandwidth due to excessively long URLs. According to a recent article over at O3 Magazine, they took a typical Facebook home page, looked at the traffic statistics from compete.com, and figured out the bandwidth savings if Facebook switched from using URL paths which, in some cases, run over 150 characters in length, to shorter ones. It looks at the impact on service providers, with the wasted bandwidth used by the subsequent GET requests for these excessively long URLs. Facebook is just one example; many other sites have similar problems, as well as CMS products such as Word Press. It's an interesting approach to web optimization for high traffic sites."

3 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Waste of effort by krou · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Exactly. If they wanted to try optimize the site, they could start looking at the number of Javascript files they include (8 on the homepage alone) and the number of HTTP requests each page requires. My Facebook page has *20* files getting included alone.

    From what I can judge, a lot of their Javascript and CSS files don't seem to be getting cached on the client's machine either. They could also take a look at using CSS sprites to reduce the number of HTTP requests required by their images.

    I mean, clicking on the home button is a whopping 726KB in size (with only 145 KB coming from cache), and 167 HTTP requests! Sure, a lot seem to be getting pulled from a content delivery network, but come on, that's a bit crazy.

    Short URIs are the least of their worries.

    --
    'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
  2. I can top that. Try the Globe and Mail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For an even more egregious example of web design / CMS fail, take a look at the HTML on this page.

    $ wc wtf.html
    12480 9590 166629 wtf.html

    I'm not puzzled by the fact that it took 166 kilobytes of HTML to write 50 kilobytes of text. That's actually not too bad. What takes it from bloated into WTF-land is the fact that that page is 12,480 lines long. Moreover...

    $ vi wtf.html

    ...the first 1831 lines (!) of the page are blank. That's right, the &lt!DOCTYPE... declaration is on line 1832, following 12 kilobytes of 0x20, 0x09, and 0x0a characters - spaces, tabs, and linefeeds. Then there's some content, and then another 500 lines of tabs and spaces between each chunk of text. WTF? (Whitespace, Then Failure?)

    Attention Globe and Mail web designers: When your idiot print newspaper editor tells you to make liberal use of whitespace, this is not what he had in mind!

  3. Re:I can top that. Try the Globe and Mail! by LateArthurDent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...the first 1831 lines (!) of the page are blank...Attention Globe and Mail web designers: When your idiot print newspaper editor tells you to make liberal use of whitespace, this is not what he had in mind!

    Believe it or not, someone had it in mind. This is most likely a really, really stupid attempt at security by obscurity.

    PHB:My kid was showing me something on our website, and then he just clicked some buttons and the entire source code was available for him to look at. You need to do something about that.
    WebGuy:You mean the html code? Well, that actually does need to get transferred. You see, the browser does the display transformation on the client's computer...
    PHB:The source code is out intellectual property!
    WebGuy:Fine. We'll handle it. ::whispering to WebGuy #2:: Just add a bunch of empty lines. When the boss looks at it, he won't think to scroll down much before he gives up.
    PHB:Ah, I see that when I try to look at the source it now shows up blank! Good work!