Clamping Down on Website Traffic

Two things:
1. different image formats use different amounts of bandwidth. For example, converting the "http://" graphic on this post from .gif format to a .jpg format would reduce its size (by how much depends on whether the web designer is willing to put up with a quality loss)
2. most image file formats (notably .jpg .gif and .png) already have built-in compression, so having the web server do another round of lossless compression doesn't gain you anything. The place you get major gains is with text.

[good point, but gif isn't always smaller. jpg is good for more realistic photos, gif is good for solid colors. and you're right about the image, compressing compressed files usually increases their size!]

There is probably a neat diagnostic tool that could be built, which would send out spiders to monitor the bandwidth pigginess of different web sites, and publish a list, just like the EPA does for mileage and Energy Star.

Building your site using the standards also drastically decrease the size of your site.

Down with IE!

Doing correct HTML is a big help as well. This site does not even validate. That goofy menu at the top is all images too, it can be done with all text and css. Getting rid of the comments in the HTML will be a small help, and compressing the javascript files. There are tools on the web for that.

Dropping all the stuff under the posts would cut size as well. Maybe set some conversion goals on your tracking software to see if anyone really uses those links. Look to see what images could be replaced with css.

Wanna reduce your bandwidth costs... remove all the crap below the comment box.

Ton of bandwidth could be saved by removing stuff you don't need to send!

damo,

you have some legitimate points but you need to clean up the language.

google dell intel wants greener pcs. because majority of power burns off in heat .. hmm so turning off a computer would out scale bandwidth of website pictures.

turn your computer off after you look at colourful websites and you'll save boat loads more.

datacentres buying power efficent servers will far offset an extra second on the carrier

efficiency over sacrifice

google dell intel wants greener pcs. because majority of power burns off in heat .. hmm so turning off a computer would out scale bandwidth of website pictures.

>>>these are different items - there's no reason why you can't do both

turn your computer off after you look at colourful websites and you'll save boat loads more.
>>sure, great idea

datacentres buying power efficient servers will far offset an extra second on the carrier
>>>why not both?

efficiency over sacrifice
>>>I'm not clear on the sacrifice part; there is no downside to turning on web compression except that your processor gets used more. That could be an issue but by and large the bandwidth savings is more beneficial.

i dont swear? and continually tried to adjust my tone, i wish to add to this, not tear it down. i love this site since i found it last month and want to comply.. even if its objective

I find it very ironic that TreeHugger is posting this story. Look at this page itself:

Documents (23 files) 51 KB (143 KB uncompressed)
Images (115 files) 691 KB
Objects (4 files) 87 KB
Scripts (22 files) 55 KB (78 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (2 files) 20 KB
Total 903 KB (1018 KB uncompressed)

I'd say this website is one of the biggest bandwidth hogs I visit on a regular basis. Thank goodness for the RSS feed, so I can just get the content (although only partials - I have to click through if I want to read more).

With "Over 40,000,000 modern, green pages served", if you can cut the page size by 10%, which isn't hard on a site like this, you'd save 90.3 KB per page, or nearly 3.5 GB of bandwidth.

The other thing I was thinking is what does bandwidth have to do with the environment? Sure, it costs more money, but does it really waste energy?

Back to TreeHugger - how about a "lite" version? Or full articles in the RSS feed, please? Just something to consider...

this is just my view for others to agree or disagree. which initially i may have slightly got confused with your reasons for saving on bandwidth :-/ soz

by dropping graphics and toning back flash and streaming content in the aid to save for other reasons than to save your own quota, client or host wise, means your with the wrong provider.

with technology comes advances to compensate eg. with sites like youtube, hopefully infrastructure will become numb to feeling the need to charge us for bandwidth at all. as backbones speed up, bandwidth costs are eased, as hard disks grow disk quotas are relaxed. and as home links speed up web hosts are forced/want to respond accordingly and bring new services to light. like buying movies and songs online, streaming live tv and radio, video conferencing, buying and downloading CD sized programs online. things move so fast.

things that bug me with some webmasters that dont know what theyre doing, is when wallpaper sized pictures get called as thumbnails and being forced to fit by their tags. out side of poor skills its a nightmare for viewers, especially if their link is choked at the server.

others are pages that go scroll forever, some get so bad some browsers can hang while it responds during loading.

minimizing text though doesnt make any impact when a small icon usually out strips any review. (unless your serving millions, but then theres revenue involved). for large audiences its the back end scripting that has big impacts in response, but this isnt bandwidth issue, just delays.

but still, you should have to restrict or 'impede' your content to meet divide correctly between your content and your audience (especially for regular business sites). research your host, use good code and picking the right pic formats plus a few bucks a week and you can strat your own youtube.

Treehugger does use gzip compression, and after one visit a lot of the stuff on it gets cached and is not downloaded again.

The site would be pretty sad without the pics with the posts, and I assume it wouldn't exist without the ads.

Still, must be very little bandwidth compared to youtube or p*rn sites :)

Eric wrote:

I find it very ironic that TreeHugger is posting this story. Look at this page itself:

Documents (23 files) 51 KB (143 KB uncompressed)
Images (115 files) 691 KB
Objects (4 files) 87 KB
Scripts (22 files) 55 KB (78 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (2 files) 20 KB
Total 903 KB (1018 KB uncompressed)

Gulp -you're right. I ran the tool at port 80 to get my numbers; it is correct to say that the typical TH page is compressed 80 percent, but that doesn't include all the stuff you have to load in. Now, caching takes care of a lot of those external items = images, scripts, style sheets, maybe objects. but you re right that the inital load is a megabyte.

Could the compression engine be dynamic, i.e. only trying to compress text and uncompressed graphics formats? Also, that http:// graphic is a good example of what should be a compressed JPEG. If the site's data weren't already compressed, that is.

Compression is difficult, because you have to consider what should and shouldn't be compressed - you often lose quality with compression since its lossy.

Indeed, Treehugger is definitely one of the worst websites I frequent in terms of painfully slow bloat, as bad as the newspaper and magazine sites, and with even worse rendering problems on Firefox 1, which I still use on one ancient machine I still have in use. Granted, with a super-fast brand-new 2.4GHz core 2 duo and a few gigabytes of memory and the very latest Firefox, and a fast network connection, it's pretty usable, but really painful on anything old. And, for that matter, this comment box isn't rendering correctly on the latest Firefox, about half of the leftmost character is cut off.

I guess websites can be expensive to run, but trying to cut out graphics and video can also be detrimental to your business's conversion rates.

I would weight up the ROI before making any major changes

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