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RSS worse than Graphics

So, I looked for what the main file was. I expected that the biggest offender would be my main logo, which accounts for, on average, 12% to 15% of my overall traffic.

However, that wasn't the biggest bandwidth user by a long shot. The number one file in terms of GB transferred from this site to the Internet, averaging 31% of all traffic, a total of 8.42GB of textual data was...

atom.xml

That's right...the atom feed file, all text, was over twice the bandwidth use as any single other file including an image file that is 1.5 times its size. It's really not surprising when you consider the effect that feeds have had on web usage. To reload an image, you have to reload a site. To reload a feed, you do...nothing. Your feed reader will do that. Feed readers hit a feed pretty often, and why not? There's no more work required, beyond a preferences setting, to have your feed reader of choice hit a site every 5 minutes or once a month. My feed reader of choice is Safari, and I hit hundreds of feeds every 30 minutes.

Now, according to feedburner, there are 901 people subscribed to my feed. If we assumed that stayed stable, and their update frequencies are the same, that's (901x49Kx48x365)/12 for 64,457,540KB, or 64GB of data every month in RSS alone. Obviously, this tells us that no, 901 people aren't downloading 49K of data every 30 minutes 365 days a year. But it does tell me that feeds are, or are about to become, the #1 use of bandwidth for websites, (outside of really big stuff like Video/Audio or Flash). For people who include images in RSS, oy vey.

This isn't surprising to me, because outside of web comic sites that don't include the comics in the feed, there are really a small number of sites where the feed isn't my primary UI. Out of those, one, MacSurfer, doesn't have a feed and two, Daring Fireball and Ars Technica, have sites with designs I find aesthetically pleasing enough that I don't WANT to read their feed. The others either don't update enough for feeds to be worth the effort, or the site setup doesn't lend itself to feeds.

Other than yet something else to deal with when it comes to managing bandwidth, I'm not sure what this really means, but it's interesting.

Oh, and the top search strings for each month? "Firefox download error -228" (twice) and "bynkii" (once). Take that for what it's worth.

Posted by John C. Welch at 16:10 | Permalink

Long ago, in the stone age of the Web, we cared about graphics. About optimizing graphics via compression, interlacing, shrinking the colors used, all of it. We cared deeply about such things. Recently I took a look at the actual file downloads for this site, looking to see how I could reduce my bandwidth usage, and therefore, my costs. To give you an idea, this site ships, on average, around 7-9GB per month. In the last three month period, (Aug-Oct), the total was 26.79GB. For a site that doesn't really have much in the way of images, and few that aren't hosted somewhere else, that's a lot of text.\n\nSo, I looked for what the main file was. I expected that the biggest offender would be my main logo, which accounts for, on average, 12% to 15% of my overall traffic.\n\nHowever, that wasn't the biggest bandwidth user by a long shot. The number one file in terms of GB transferred from this site to the Internet, averaging 31% of all traffic, a total of 8.42GB of textual data was...\n\natom.xml\n\nThat's right...the atom feed file, all text, was over twice the bandwidth use as any single other file including an image file that is 1.5 times its size. It's really not surprising when you consider the effect that feeds have had on web usage. To reload an image, you have to reload a site. To reload a feed, you do...nothing. Your feed reader will do that. Feed readers hit a feed pretty often, and why not? There's no more work required, beyond a preferences setting, to have your feed reader of choice hit a site every 5 minutes or once a month. My feed reader of choice is Safari, and I hit hundreds of feeds every 30 minutes. \n\nNow, according to feedburner, there are 901 people subscribed to my feed. If we assumed that stayed stable, and their update frequencies are the same, that's (901x49Kx48x365)/12 for 64,457,540KB, or 64GB of data every month in RSS alone. Obviously, this tells us that no, 901 people aren't downloading 49K of data every 30 minutes 365 days a year. But it does tell me that feeds are, or are about to become, the #1 use of bandwidth for websites, (outside of really big stuff like Video/Audio or Flash). For people who include images in RSS, oy vey. \n\nThis isn't surprising to me, because outside of web comic sites that don't include the comics in the feed, there are really a small number of sites where the feed isn't my primary UI. Out of those, one, MacSurfer, doesn't have a feed and two, Daring Fireball and Ars Technica, have sites with designs I find aesthetically pleasing enough that I don't WANT to read their feed. The others either don't update enough for feeds to be worth the effort, or the site setup doesn't lend itself to feeds.\n\nOther than yet something else to deal with when it comes to managing bandwidth, I'm not sure what this really means, but it's interesting.\n\nOh, and the top search strings for each month? \"Firefox download error -228\" (twice) and \"bynkii\" (once). Take that for what it's worth.