How much bandwidth does viewing a webpage use?

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nathanm

6 posts

Wannabe Geek

# 21286 21-Apr-2008 22:30

Hey there,

I just got a mobile data card and I have some questions to help me keep within my data cap. (I have already setup useage alerts)

Does anyone know who much bandwidth a typical wepage uses? Does it vary much from site to site? Is viewing a page on Facebook going to be any different than viewing a page on geekzone or the nzherald website? Does anyone know how to measure it?

Thanks

Nathan

johnr

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# 125452 21-Apr-2008 22:36

Every web pages is different!

manhinli

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# 125456 21-Apr-2008 22:46

In Firefox, the Page Info dialog (available from Tools > Page Info) tells you quite a lot, including the page size.

For this page (before I posted) it was: 6.53 KB (6,683 bytes)

EDIT: Well, it only tells you the size of the page, and not any of the content, so...

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RedJungle

Phil Gale
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# 125525 22-Apr-2008 11:37

Also remember that when you revisit a page it should be (mostly) cached by your browser meaning the page size isn't always indicative of what you've downloaded anyway.

Red Jungle: we make fantastic software

freitasm

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Geekzone

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# 125529 22-Apr-2008 11:54

There's no formula here. Every single web page is different and contains different elements...

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zocster

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# 125545 22-Apr-2008 13:01

As above it's different from website to website, you may want to refrain from browsing facebook as some people have so many applications that will take a lot of bandwidth to load, so are news sites. Depending on your data plan, you may want to use it accordingly. Try browsing your email on webmail when you're on a datacard, just in case someone sends you a huge attachment.

chakkaradeep

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# 125547 22-Apr-2008 13:05

nathanm:
Hey there,
I just got a mobile data card and I have some questions to help me keep within my data cap. (I have already setup useage alerts)
Does anyone know who much bandwidth a typical wepage uses? Does it vary much from site to site? Is viewing a page on Facebook going to be any different than viewing a page on geekzone or the nzherald website? Does anyone know how to measure it?
Thanks
Nathan

It depends entirely on the content of the webpage. If I have a page full of photos, its going to eat up your bandwidth for downloading those photos to view. If there is only text, there is just the transfer data. Geekzone will not take much bandwidth because you find most of the time only texts everywhere and very less images, but Facebook isnt the same. It has got a mixture of data and so it depends on that content.

Regards,
Chaks

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SamF

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# 125549 22-Apr-2008 13:17

The tool you need is Netlimiter (http://www.netlimiter.com). There is a free monitoring version which tells you in great detail, which applications are using what, when and how much. It has a great history stats feature also.

I've been using this for years, it was very hard to find tho!! Very useful for all sorts of stuff!

Let me know if you have any questions about it.

Sam.

nathanm

6 posts

Wannabe Geek

# 126079 24-Apr-2008 11:27

Hey thanks everybody for your replies.

Its obviously not as easy to measure as I thought and I understand that every page is different.

Could anyone give me an approximate range? What would be the maxium I could expect from visiting a page? (I know a lot of sites these days also have video embedded so I could imagine that must chew through a lot of bandwidth?)

It sure must be risky being on one of the 200MB broadband plans with huge excess usages charges??!!

Detruire

1274 posts

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# 126149 24-Apr-2008 15:06

It's rather likely that you will find a single page with over 10MB of crap attached (Flash, lots of JS, CSS and images...)

I believe that the average page size I visit daily is ~800kilobytes. I use around 100MB a day without any streaming. (Was 50MB a day on dialup)

A quick tip: Install Adblock and Firefox. Adblock can save around 100kilobytes on many pages with too many ads.

rm *

manhinli

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# 126152 24-Apr-2008 15:14

Detruire: It's rather likely that you will find a single page with over 10MB of crap attached (Flash, lots of JS, CSS and images...)

I believe that the average page size I visit daily is ~800kilobytes. I use around 100MB a day without any streaming. (Was 50MB a day on dialup)

I woke up at 9am, started using my computer from 10am, and now it's 3pm and I've used 100MB. (No YouTube, nothing but Geekzone, emails, and daily RSS + the odd update by auto updating programs...)

In times when I need to remove all images and scripts (or when I'm restricted) - I use Lynx. It's good enough to run Gmail! Just brings back the good ol' days.

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webwat

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# 126920 28-Apr-2008 22:31

Web pages use as much bandwidth as you have got, but might finish downloading in a few seconds. The size of the page affects how long it keeps downloading for, and TV news websites are pretty hungry. Some other more simple websites keep changing the advertising after you finished loading the page. Basic rule is that almost nobody should have less than 1GB data cap. If you need to use Vodafone mobile then try to keep it just for urgent text-based things.

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Lurch

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# 126959 29-Apr-2008 06:03

One thing to do would be to block all pictures/adds/banner adds from loading. I have this setup so it uses less bandwidth when mobile so I just get the text it also makes it alot quicker to get to the information you need/want. Also good to not install plugins like flash etc as these will also use bandwidth.

As for size of webpage thats really hard to put a ball park figure on as each page is different.