AS HN: How much Bandwidth do you consume per day? How can I reduce mine?
Pardon my asking two questions in one.<p>Is there a way of knowing how much bandwidth you consume in a day/month?<p>Secondly, Internet access here in Nigeria is on the high side $100/month for about 7 GB of bandwidth which is far from enough considering I do not watch any videos online. I was wondering if there was a way I could reduce my consumption. Say<p>1. Preventing pages I am not presently on from loading anything.
2. preventing the one million images on TC and other sites from loading as if I do not need all of them everytime I visit.
3. Having a downgraded quality of images open.<p>
I looked to see if there is any chrome extension but cannot fine one. This is not a problem for most people but I think it is here. At least for me. Any suggestions will be really appreciated.
35 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 81.6 ms ] threadhttp://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/
Also, in Opera Shift+I toggles displaying of images. There's built-in easy to use content blocker, so you can kill useless images (e.g. avatars, tweet buttons). Opera 11 added Flashblock ("Enable plug-ins on demand" in advanced prefs).
Opera CEO was at Plugg (conference) last year and he explained that Opera market share was huge in Russia and poor countries because of that feature. As for OP lot of people dont have unlimited bandwith and Opera seems to be the best at keeping the consumption low.
Using the mobile versions of sites saves a lot of bandwidth
Opera can do the downgrading of images
I've only had one month of over 15GB of downloads and I watch several hours of online video a week (ustream, youtube, TV Catchup, iPlayer).
What would be better would be flashblock for images, so you can selectively load them instead of being all-or-none.
Other idea: Get a VPS or cheap webserver (<$5/mo) and run a high-compressing proxy on it.
I use < 5 gb a month. How do you manage 7 without downloading videos? Also, what browser are you using? (pure guess ahead) Maybe if you use a browser that does more caching you'll use less bandwidth? I use Safari.
Enable gzip in SSH -> SSH to some machine that has unlimited Internet access (if you have one; AWS etc.) -> Use text browser from there (Elinks is nice - http://elinks.or.cz/).
This will allow you to browse Internet with bytes of traffic.
I think this would result in reduced bandwidth usage, seeing as NX is designed to be usable over a dial-up connection and uses a number of compression techniques.
Consider:
"NX requires an average of 20Kbps (kilo-bits per-second) to let users run a remote Linux session confortably (sic) ... NX can work on slower links, like 9.6 Kbps GSM connections, but in such network conditions users can experience a noticeable lag."[1]
The HNer asking the question has given us the baseline of 7 GB, though it's not exactly clear how much he uses per month, I'm going to use this as a maximum and consider anything less than 7 GB a gain in efficiency.
7 gigabyte = 58720256 kilobit, 58720256 kilobit / 20 kilobit per second = 2936012 seconds, 2936012 seconds / 60 seconds = 48933 minutes, 48933 minutes / 60 minutes = 815 hours, 815 hours / 24 hours = 33 days
So, one could browse the internet for 33 entire days before using more than 7 GB. It is, of course, impossible to browse for 33 days in a one month span, so we've gained efficiency even assuming one browses the internet every second of every day for a month.
Let's say our theoretical user is on the internet 12 hours a day, that means it would take said user 66 days to use 7 GB of bandwidth. We've gained 102% efficiency!
I think it's more likely that our theoretical user is actively using a web browser less than 4 hours per day, so if our theoretical friend uses a local X server for all his non-internet needs and strictly uses a remote X server only when he needs to view a web page, he could go more than 198 days (!) on 7 GB.
But I'm not finished yet! If our theoretical user doesn't mind "noticeable lag", he could further throttle his connection speed to 9.6 Kbps, which works out to 76 days of internet time. If he actively uses the internet less than 4 hours per day, he'll be able to go more than 456 days on 7 GB! That's 1420% more efficient than the original scenario.
Best case: > 1420% more efficient!
Did I mention our theoretical user doesn't have to give up his beloved GUI?
[1] http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR12B00119
Unforgivably, some sites didn't work with images disabled.
* Installed Squid locally - This has the benefit of allowing all your browsers to share one cache.
* Run AdBlock in Firefox - This causes advertisements to not download. The latest AdBlock in Chrome also stops the downloads (this wasn't always the case)
* Run Flashblock - Whitelist sites where you need to see flash.
* Rarely I'll disable images to view sites that I know are wasteful of bandwidth
* Use elinks, rather than lynx. elinks feels much more user friendly.
My current machine runs OSX and I used brew to install squid/elinks.
Looks like it's ~10.7 GB down and ~5.95 GB up on average per day.
Definitely give Opera Turbo a shot, I use it all the time when accessing the web over tethered 3G and it speeds things up so much.
What I have done is disable images in chrome then use the ad block extension. Let me see long this my last purchase will last.
If I wanted to reduce bandwidth I guess I'd get netflix so some bandwidth goes via the mail.
Reducing bandwidth to 7 GB a month sounds extremely painful. Bye streams, videos, most images, torrents, even pandora.
(I have unlimited fast bandwidth, but sometimes like this anyway ... the text web.)
I also run Adblock+ on all browsers.
By far the best bandwidth meter I've ever encountered is BitMeter: http://codebox.org.uk/pages/bitmeteros
BitMeter OS is cross-platform, displays all data through your browser, and makes a number of things simpler. You can also set alarms, keep long-term logs, and the logger runs as a service so you can leave it working happily in the background. It'll also import from another logger or two, and has simple data import/export.
If you just need Windows integration, BitMeter 2 has a floaty display and a few other niceties.
For myself, I hit > 40GB monthly, less than a gig of which (typically) is torrents, so that's all browsing + download traffic. Removing videos of all kinds, it'd probably be less than 10GB. A lot of my browsing is on mostly-text content (frequently linked from here).
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Run AdBlock, and depending on your browser, disable images or install an image blocking plugin. A plugin is probably a better option, as they usually provide simpler ways to download images selectively than outright disabling.
A Flash-blocker can also save quite a bit, as a lot of ads are well over 100KB for simple behavior. Some go over 500, and that adds up quickly.
1) Enter about:config in your Firefo address bar.
2) Type network.prefetch-next in filter text box.
3) Change the value to false by right clicking.
Install a proxy server, such as squid, on your local machine. Point your browser to use the local proxy server. Some stuff will get cached on your proxy server and will not be loaded from the Internet.
You can install some additional filters and chain your proxy servers so that they strip out adverts and what nots.