Average Web Page Approaches 1MB

MrSeb writes "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet's most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes, up more than 30% from last year's average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive's recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts." If you have a personal home page, how big is it?

Comments

How Big?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's rather personal.

Re:How Big?

[Pharmboy]

Well, I don't mind bragging about mine. I was 100k, but now has swollen to 150k this year. As to *real* servers, I try to keep our ecommerce pages below 250k for gateway pages. Until this year, I tried to keep them under 150k. Up until 2008, 100k was the target. Before 2003, 50k. This is kind of light, and a few pages bust this, but very few. Before 2000, I used to spend lots of time just optimizing graphics, now I just use some common sense, PS, and very little time.

What I have found is that the total k of data isn't as important as the number of items and hosts the page calls. I find I can make my pages faster by using image maps, which make larger images size (12 images 1 image of all 12 items) but load faster because it takes less connects. There are a few tools online that can help you figure out total load times. Nowadays, load time is NOT purely a function of the size of the data. If you can cut down on the number of GETS and cross domain GETS (ie: DNS lookups) you can radically cut down load time and reliability.

Also, pages that don't need to be dynamic, shouldn't be. Our gateway (to product categories) pages are generated as we update the site, and stored static. This allows them to be cached. It sounds old fashioned, but the fact is that it greatly increases perceived latency. I am amazed at how many websites are generated via PHP and SQL on the fly, yet aren't updated more than a couple times a day or less. That is a lot of wasted CPU cycles on the server, and a lot of wasted potential for caching, both locally and down the line. And yes, it makes your website load slower, making it seem like your pages are larger than they are.

Re:How Big?

[Burning1]

Also, pages that don't need to be dynamic, shouldn't be. Our gateway (to product categories) pages are generated as we update the site, and stored static. This allows them to be cached. It sounds old fashioned, but the fact is that it greatly increases perceived latency. I am amazed at how many websites are generated via PHP and SQL on the fly, yet aren't updated more than a couple times a day or less. That is a lot of wasted CPU cycles on the server, and a lot of wasted potential for caching, both locally and down the line. And yes, it makes your website load slower, making it seem like your pages are larger than they are.

With a good caching engine, dynamically generated webpages should be nearly as fast as a static page - the page it's self is parsed and cached, then only re-parsed if the input changes.

Re:How Big?

[segin]

You should see what Google does with anchors in Gmail's interface - it's AJAX and history navigation works pretty much like it should if it wasn't. Please don't hold me to it, but from what I understand, you just have to manage to change the # and everything after it in the URL bar to convince the browser that it's a new page. How else do you think clicking "Back" in a Wikipedia page after clicking in a section link takes you back to the scroll position in the same page you were at before you clicked? But like I said, don't hold me to it entirely, I might be talking out of my arse. Anyone with tips on how it's done: Reply to me and/or parent and point us in the right direction on how that's done. I'd like to use it for a site that I am certain would benefit from AJAX "pages", as it's almost completely static HTML, with everything outside the main body (aside from the navbar to the left) remains static across pages.

Re:How Big?

[buchner.johannes]

With a good caching engine, dynamically generated webpages should be nearly as fast as a static page - the page it's self is parsed and cached, then only re-parsed if the input changes.

The Linux kernel can take a file and put it on the socket without Apache loading it even partially into memory. *This* is fast.

Re:How Big?

[Pharmboy]

No rational ecommerce site designs for a 1920 wide screen. You always design for the lowest common denominator. Most customers aren't computer geeks, and you want everyone's money, not just the smart peoples. Personal websites (the topic of the story) yes, but never for money making websites. We still design around a maximum width of 900 pixels (menus plus 760px of actual content), and will for some time. This allows for for scroll bars and a little buffer on a 1024x768 screen, or for half of a 1080p screen. It also makes it readable from tablets and phones without having multiple code bases, which is prohibitively expensive for a small to medium sized ecommerce site.

can't wait to see these on my phone!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing phone carriers don't limit your data consumption....

oh wait..

Re:can't wait to see these on my phone!

[MichaelSmith]

The browser on my phone crashes on pages that size, including most articles on slashdot, so the data it uses is somewhat self limiting.

Re:can't wait to see these on my phone!

[hipp5]

The phone issue is interesting. I was just on the "How Much Data Do You Need?" page for a local provider. You slide the bar for various things, like how many web pages you visit in a month (as if anyone really knows that). Their assumption was 0.17MB/page. I know there are mobile versions of pages and such, but this still seems like a gross underestimate given this story.

Not surprised

[kannibal_klown]

With the growth of Javascript libraries like JQuery for more UI features, more images, I can see it reaching that high.

Meanwhile, web developers don't care because more and more people are getting faster and faster broadband speeds. So as long as the page-load metric works OK on their rig or perhaps what the envision most of their viewers have... they think it's all OK.

Re:Not surprised

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Apparently it is because users are still hitting their websites.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Web developers don't care because the majority of their images/css/js is cacheable by each visitor (and most people have jQuery cached from the official site and many sites link to that directly). 1MB page but it's only 45k on the next visit.

Re:Not surprised

[CastrTroy]

Would be something interesting if the browser vendors collected anonymous usage data though. Not even which sites you visited, but just stuff that would be useful to the developers, like page size, time to download, time to render, cache hit frequency. Obviously many people would want to turn this off, but if you got enough people using it, you could get some really interesting data. As long as you don't collect information about which sites are being visited, but rather the characteristics of the sites being loaded, I don't think people would have too much of a problem.

Re:Not surprised

[TheSpoom]

Yup. Google helps us out here. If we're using offsite resources like that, there's a fair likelihood that it's cached in the user's browser even if it's the first time they've visited the site.

Re:Not surprised

[jenn_13]

I don't know about other developers, but I do care, and try to keep pages small. More and more people are accessing the web on mobile devices, so minimizing the data going back and forth, and round trips to the server, is important to user experience. In the design community, designing with mobile devices in mind is a growing practice.

Re:Not surprised

[Threni]

Forgive me piggybacking here, but I've a web question. I read Slashdot predominantly on my phone (doesn't everyone?), but once you get 5 or 6 levels of replying in, the posts become unreadable. Each reply has a shorter width then the one above, meaning you end up with a handful of characters per line, and the rest of the horizontal space as just that - space. Is that really how it's supposed to be - completely unreadable? Is there no way of overriding it and saying 'look, I know it's a reply due to the context`. I've tried poking around in the various options within Slashdot, but I don't understand what most of them do, and the so-called help is completely useless and doesn't describe what the options mean nor how to use them. I think the problem is that the designers of Slashdot believe everyone is using a monitor so you'd probably need to be about 30 or 40 levels in to get to the same problem.

I'm using Dolphin HD on Android but a friend with an Apple phone has the same problem. Is there an answer?

Re:Not surprised

[webnut77]

Yup. Google helps us out here. If we're using offsite resources like that, there's a fair likelihood that it's cached in the user's browser even if it's the first time they've visited the site.

And then Google also gets to look at the referrer data.

Re:Not surprised

[matmota]

First select the "classic discussion system (D1)" under "Discussions" in your options (gear icon). Then, in the settings just below the summary pick the "flat" view instead of "nested".

Missing data

[instagib]

Average information content - does a page view give me more insight as a user now than it did 10 years ago?

Re:Missing data

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago online video was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist it was never larger than 320x240. Pictures were equally low resolution and page formatting was minimal. Allowing user comments was rare, and user contribution based sites like YouTube and Wikipedia were nonexistent. Oh yea, and the "blink" tag was still popular. So yes, I would say the amount of information has increased significantly.

Re:Missing data

[bonch]

10 years ago was 2002. You think that in 2002, online video was virtually nonexistent, pictures were all low resolution, and allowing user comments was rare? Video sites like Ebaumsworld were already posting user-submitted videos. Instead of Facebook pages, people had Myspace pages. And no, the blink tag was not still popular--at that point it only existed on old Geocities sites and other leftovers from the 90s.

Information-wise, the web has barely changed. Slashdot was several years old at that point and already posting the same things posts now.

Ad Content

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much of it is ads?

Re:Ad Content

[Idbar]

My webpage is just about 1k. But you have you watch a 30 sec. interlaced Bluray quality ad before you can see it.

Please remember the dial-up users...

[MetricT]

and the 3G users, and the satellite users, and everyone else that has a low-bandwidth and/or high cost per byte connection.

My parents can't get DSL or cable. They're stuck with 22k dial-up, and use AdBlock Plus, NoFlash, and Propel accelerator with compression set to the point where you can barely recognize photos, and it still takes 2 minutes for a reasonably normal page (CNN, MSNBC) to load, much less anything with a ton of Javascript or Flash.

Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?

Oh, and Propel, please move to JPEG2000 and XZ compression. Some people need every byte they can get.

Re:Please remember the dial-up users...

[Mitreya]

Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?

Ooooh, ooooh, I have a better idea! Can't website ditch the f**cking crap they now use (reaching 1MB average?) and just re-do their site as a nice, simple website that you describe?
I will never understand why any website would have a legitimate need for background music. Or an interactive (a-la-DVD opening screen) navigation with 1-second delay and buzzing sounds. And don't get me started on pages with 2-3 video clips playing, sometimes with sound (not every computer I use has blockers installed). So many pages take a couple of second to load on a reasonably fast broadband. Often stopping for 10 seconds because some 3-rd party website is lagging behind.
Oh, and they should get off my lawn, too.

Size Doesn't Matter

[stating_the_obvious]

It's not the size of the home page, it's the motion of the .GIF

Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

And.... when running AdBlock Plus, this figure goes down to 100kB. I run AdBlock mostly for the massive speed increase that comes with it.

People don't know how to do websites...

[Anonymous Coward]

My fully featured CMS that used jQuery, jQuery UI, and a lot of heavy library takes 140kb. Learn to optimize people!!

If you have a homepage

[burning-toast]

I have a homepage, and it's only 4.92Kb. Granted it is the "It Works!" page for CentOS which has all of the other text and icons and such but who needs more than that? Do people really have personalized home pages now that Facebook came about (other than some hobbyists or professionals who run a side business)?

I wonder what the average "Facebook" homepage size is... since that is what most people will be seeing regularly.

- Toast

Re:If you have a homepage

[wjcofkc]

I don't know about Facebook but I'm willing to bet that the average MySpace page is up to 5 megabytes. Then again I haven't been there since 07'.

Web Hosting by Buy N Large

[ackthpt]

I think eBay lead the curve on this one. I complained bitterly to them about how long it took their bloated pages to load when I was still on dialup. Nobody cares.

I suppose the telecoms do. This increases the liklihood of blowing through your monthly bandwidth cap without even watching videos.

Compression?

[s7uar7]

If the bulk of the increase is from javascript wouldn't turning on compression on the web server solve the problem? They're text files, they compress down massively.

Re:Compression?

[TheSpoom]

Yes, compression helps (and is generally done automatically in any good Apache configuration). What helps even more from a user's perspective is combining files; basically, in the backend we combine all our Javascript and CSS (or as much as is reasonable) into one file instead of serving it as multiple, separate files linked to the current page. This cuts down on HTTP requests massively and speeds site loading from a user's perspective. Yahoo has a great list of best practices for speeding up sites if you're interested.

Re:Compression?

[mollymoo]

Persistent HTTP connections were tacked on to HTTP 1.0 years ago and are widely supported, but you still have the "can I have that bit now please?" overhead with the associated latency between retrieving each file on each connection. 100ms of latency multiplied by a dozen assets soon adds up. HTTP 1.1's pipelining means you can ask for many things at once so only suffer that hit once (or twice - page then assets), but in practice browser support for pipelining is poor.

Larger Pages

[Master Moose]

And Less Content. .

I remeber the days when a site would include an 10 paragraph article on one page - Not 10 pages with a paragraph on each.

Re:Larger Pages

[greenhollow]

On most sites that I go to that have a paragraph per page model, I just click the "Print" button/link on the site and they combine the pages for printing. Then I read it without needing to print it. Sometimes they require printing it. If they do, I am less likely to read the article at all.

Flawed methods ...

[oneiros27]

This only matters if people go to the first page, and never go to any additional ones.

For most websites these days, you'll take the initial hit from javascript and the 'branding' images when you first get to the site ... but the changing content per page is much lower.

If websites are using standard javascript libraries being served by Google's CDN, then it's possible that someone visiting your page already has jquery, mootools or similar cached and doesn't need to load yet another copy.

I also didn't see if they had any comparison between transferred size vs. used size. (eg, javascript that's sent compressed) ... and as this is from an new archive ... does anyone know if Archive.org could analyze their holdings to see what the longer term trends are?

Now I can feel smug

[rbrander]

My home page remains where it has been since 1993 at the Calgary Unix Users Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr ...clocks in at 9.2K, plus a 15K GIF and a 9.1K JPG (if you "turn on images" in your browser - remember when it was a realistic option not to?)

I have held the line, while Viewing With Alarm (VWA) the growth of web pages for the entire 18 years since. I wrote Bob Metcalfe when he had a column at InfoWorld 15 years back, and he was Viewing With Alarm the exponential growth in Internet traffic and predicting the "collapse of the Internet" (had to eat those words - literally) because of it. My letter pointed out that his column constituted 2K of text - that was all the generated content that was bringing in the readers, (unless you count the 10K gif of Bob Metcalfe, and I don't), and the page had an additional 100K of framing and advertising-related image GIFs. His reply was somewhat defensive.

This last year, I had occasion to travel on the Queen Mary 2, where all internet is via satellite at a minimum of 34 cents per minute with their bulk plan. How quickly I grew to resent the giant Flash blobs that would be automatically downloaded with every page of a newspaper so I wouldn't miss the animated ads for the latest in car buys. At QM2 speeds, I'd have to wait about two minutes before I even had an "X" mark to click on to dismiss the ad. I was rather quickly cured of almost any interest in the Internet content at ALL, I did my E-mail, checked the google news headlines (fewest high-byte ads), and logged off.

My point: 90% of mail is spam. So are 90% of web page bytes. We just don't call it spam. We call it "the whole outside frame around the news page that we try not to see, but keeps jumping around into our field of view".

Re:Now I can feel smug

[whisper_jeff]

Sorry to be a dick but you're bragging about that page? Really? You know when they say "size doesn't matter"? Yeah - sometimes it also means being as small as possible is not necessarily a good thing. I would have thought that page was trash ten years ago when Geocities webpages were everywhere so, now, it's really not good... Seriously, stop bragging about it and spend some time designing a real page.

Sorry to be a dick - someone had to tell you...

No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk.

[Animats]

There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts.

No, it's not about HTML 5. A lot of it is about bloated content management systems and templates.

I was looking at a Wall Street Journal page recently, and I brought it into an HTML editor so I could eliminate all non-story content. The story required an HTML page with only 72 lines. The original page was over 4000 lines. It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.

On top of that, there are content management systems which create a custom CSS page for each content page. So there's no useful caching in the browser.

Remember those people who said CSS was going to make web pages shorter? They were wrong. Look at Slashdot - bloated, slow pages that don't do much, yet consume CPU time when idle.

Re:No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk.

[Desler]

But Slashdot is now web 2.0, Ajax-enabled and social. Pretty soon it'll be "hosted on the cloud" and provide SaaS so it can win at buzzword bingo!

Re:No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk.

[rubycodez]

let's just use 1 acronym for all that, BWC. Bloated Web Crapware

Re:No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk.

[archen]

I agree that the reason things are getting bigger is because of extra "crap" getting served. Comercial pages are the biggest chunk of it, but even stuff like wordpress can toss out a lot of junk with templates. With bigger screen resolutions and assumed high speed internet, I'm seeing many sites being much more sloppy with large graphics too. The slashdot question at the end makes it sound like personal pages are relavent to this statistic. What percentage of the population actually has a personal homepage these days? 0.2% ? Facebook and blogging covers 99% of what most people need.

I've had a page since 1997 and the average page size hasn't changed a whole lot. With the transition from table layouts to css the file sizes went down for a while, then my css got more complicated and it's about the same. A big page adds up to maybe as much as 15-20k. Anyone actually try writing 20k worth of text, grammer check it, proof read and edit it multiple times? That's a LOT of work for a file that is that small. I've got over 765 pages, with about 28Mb of stuff all together. I have no idea how much css is involved but my javascript adds up to something like 2k total (not including the google spy stuff).

Re:No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk.

[mjwx]

No, it's not about HTML 5. A lot of it is about bloated content management systems and templates.

What do you think HTML5 is all about.

An all new way to deliver bloated CMS's. Why do some people think HTML5 is some kind of magic fix for all the ills of the web?

The problem is bad design and lack of care. No one gets punished for creating a crap system, bad developers get coddled, customers are coerced, sweet talked and sometimes forced into accepting bad CMS's.

HTML5 will not stop bloat, will not stop bad, bandwidth consuming ads, it wont stop anything we dont like. In fact everything we dont like (even about flash) can and likely will be transmitted by HTML5 because like Flash, HTML5 is a delivery system, not content (yes I know this was the parents point).

Another problem is as bandwidth increases, developers put less and less time into optimisation. They dont take into account customers using mobile broad band who a lot of the time get 500-ish KB that still exist.

90KB of Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still too much flash for me

Sent from my iPhone

Re:90KB of Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Waaaah

Sent from pretty much any Android

slashdot = overweight

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically posted on a website that is itself a bloated pig.

Video sucks.

[PeanutButterBreath]

10 years ago online video was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist it was never larger than 320x240.

And now it is ubiquitous, HD and largely devoted to pointless things that would be skimmed over and disregarded in a fraction of the load time if left to text and still images.

Re:Video sucks.

[Tumbleweed]

TubeCat disagrees with everything about what you just said.

1.3mb or 1,000 lines of python

[lkcl]

my site's a pyjamas application. it is therefore 1,000 lines of python.... or, when compiled (and therefore including the pyjs runtime which does stuff like dict, list, exceptions etc. all emulated in javascript, as well as including the library of widgets that are used on the page) it's 1.3mb of really obtuse but functionally correct javascript.

Re:Hallelujah

[rwise2112]

That's what she said!

My Personal Home Page?

[nick357]

It remains the size of one of those animated "under construction" gifs.

Automatic shutdown at 95C

[mikael]

I've been able to run both CPU and GPU based CFD and 3D visualisation on my laptop without any problems, yet some flash games which are just doing 2D animation will roast a 2.7 GHz CPU to the point that the kernel decides to call it a day and shut down the whole system.

Unbelievably, these flash games aren't doing anything more complex than playing a retro 2D platform game. I'm guessing that this is due to the way in which all the separate texturemaps/pixelmaps are treated as generic webpage images rather than as a single DOOM style WAD file.

Re:Automatic shutdown at 95C

[Anonymous Coward]

In 5 more years there will be another layer of abstraction and 5GHz CPU's will be dragged to a crawl by a Super Mario Brothers clone.

Am I the only one reminded of....

[LiquidMind]

http://www.the5k.org/

It seemed so long ago. Didn't /. have an entry as well?

Too much Javascript for non-interactive content

[rollingcalf]

Some sites use Javascript to display what is semi-static data that should be assembled on the server side before transmitting to the user. For example, a news site where the stories are loaded by Javascript.

Some sites even have pages that are entirely blank if Javascript is turned off. It seems that some of these "web programmers" don't even know how to dynamically build a page with server-side scripting instead of Javascript.

Re:Too much Javascript for non-interactive content

[catbutt]

Actually that's a really smart thing to do from a bandwidth point of view. There are all kinds of reasons not to do that (some of those are gradually disappearing, since now Google's crawler is starting to run some javascript to build the page as the user will see it), but if you are concerned about bandwidth, having javascript build your page for you is a very good way to do it.

Re:Coded mine in notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

CSS is for prima donnas and Flash is for artistes. PHP is for chatterboxes and Perl is for psychics. Javascript is for the clinically insane, and Ruby is for hipsters. Drupal is for geeks and Ajax is for nerds.

I'll stick to plain-jane HTML, thanks.

"...and plain-jane HTML is for bigger hipsters than Ruby users". Understood. Thanks.

5MBs

[keith_nt4]

Damned FrontPage

... and it also sucks.

[warrax_666]

From a usability perspective:

• Blue background. Why? Are you trying to accomplish some artistic purpose we're not privy to?
• Why are the pictures laid out vertically rather than horizontally? Why is there lots of text to the right of the second picture rather than to the right of both pictures. That means that your contact info is obscured/invisible to potential readers -- it's also out of context in that place.
• Why do your anchors span multiple sentences rather than just a few semantically relevant key words?

In short: You fail web page design, so who the fuck cares if your page is 10K?

Re:... and it also sucks.

[mickwd]

"In short: You fail web page design, so who the fuck cares if your page is 10K?"

As a normal human being possessing the ability to read, I found his site perfectly accessible, and it gave me a decent amount of information about the guy in a quick, concise manner.

If I was to be snarky here, I would say something like:

In short: You fail meaningful criticism, and who the fuck cares if his "anchors span multiple sentences rather than just a few semantically relevant key words"?

Re:Hallelujah

[g0bshiTe]

It's not the size of your homepage, it's how you use it.

Load-once VS full refresh

[phorm]

Well, stuff like jQuery/Dojo/etc libraries shouldn't be loading every time you view a page.
The first view, your browser will need to load all the associated CSS, HTML, etc.
After that, included files should hopefully be cached, and only page content need be loaded.

Also, with JS libraries and AJAX, one should be able to build pages that load the overall template once, but don't require pulling large HTML files for updates (rather just pull content with AJAX).

More data, and less information

[Anonymous Coward]

What's worse is that the "payload" of text is less and less interesting. Bandwidth isn't the problem. I have more than enough bandwidth for these pages. When they hit the browser, they take forever just to render. There are a handful of web sites I still use, Slashdot among them. Most new sites I just back right up. If your site does that on day 1, it's not worth the bother. I'm not buying a new machine just to look at your crap web site that's probably just a rehash of every Internet meme.

We're well into the "nobody comes here anymore it's too crowded" and/or "57 million web sites and nothing on" stage.

Everything is clear now.

[cvtan]

Well, that explains why my 400MHz WINXP laptop with 128M memory has a heart attack trying to scroll down a page of comments on Slashdot.

Developers should care

[sakdoctor]

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/

Gzip

[sakdoctor]

Don't feel too smug. Your page isn't even compressed.

Re:Virgin Mobile

[C-Shalom]

If you have line of sight, you might consider reading 'Diary of a Not-spot' posted on The Register.
Hopefully some of what he's tried and gone through could be of help to you.

Diary of a Not-spot: One man's heroic struggle for broadband
Diary of a Not-spot: The readers speak
Diary of a Not-spot – the final chapter
Diary of a not-spot: Breaking the BT barrier

Median or mean?

[Solandri]

Median is the measure you want.

If you use the mean, 90% of web pages could stay the exact same size, but if the other 10% go nuts and increase their size 20x, the mean will grow nearly 3x.

Lies, damned lies, statistics

[adolf]

So a web page today is about 10x bigger than it was in 2003. I can accept that.

But in 2003, I had a baseline 2-megabit-per-second Internet connection and could have had a 3- or 5-megabit connection for a bit more cash.

Today, 8 years later, the "normal" connection speed for my ISP is 6-megabit.

So according to my observations and their statistics, folks are expected to download 10 times the amount of stuff using just 3 times as much available bandwidth.

In other words, the web is currently more than three times slower than it was in 2003.

Hooray!

Re:Your ~/.sig

[segin]

Unless you drive in England.

My Blog Has "Widget Fever"

[retroworks]

About half my regular blog readers are based in emerging markets / less developed countries. I began to notice that hittership was dropping in Africa and India. Reviewing about a thousand posts, I noticed that the more photos and "blogger apps" I put on the web page, the lower the readership in countries with low bandwidth. I've been more conscientious now about which photo resolution I post and tend to avoid videos. And a lot of the cool little blogger widgets don't seem as important when measured in seconds to open the page. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-has-widget-fever.html Of course my content also sometimes sucks, and it also helps if I lay off the haiku.

Page Size and Data Limits

[mk1004]

So now, as carriers start charging based on data usage, web pages continue to grow, and ads they contain as well. It was fun while it lasted.

Size of my home page

[bostongraf]

Bucking the trend, apparently.

My home page is 202 bytes.

The most used link points to a page that is 45 kilobytes. All data, no images, no css. There are 12 people that use it.

I believe my site design style could be considered Minimalist.