Re: UKNM: How much is enough

[Nabil Shabka]

All seems rather like road building.  Making roads bigger just increases

the amount of cars that use them, hence the scrubbing of the planned A40

widening. Analogy - more cars equals more page views.  As far as I can

see, the best way to decide on bandwidth is to constantly monitor

consumption and upgrade accordingly and in anticipation.  Along with

this, always gauge bandwidth consumption on spikes, not averages.  If a

site's traffic increased the moment bandwidth was increased then that

site's bandwidth must not have been right to begin with.


Also important to note is that connectivity at the other end(client) is

just as important as server bandwidth.  If the client has a slow

machine, slow modem or slow provider, they will suffer slow connections

no matter what your connectivity is.  We have cable modems in the US

pick up our site at hundreds of K a sec, while someone in the UK could

be trickling through.  The browser people use also makes a huge

difference.  Netscape and IE are fairly bloated and seem very slow when

compared to a browser like Opera.  With Opera, by the time you take your

finger off the mouse the page is loaded.  let's hope Geko does the same.


Nabil


PS  Don't rush out and get Opera just yet though, always a caveat, it

doesn't support a number of standards.


Sean Phelan wrote:

> 

> At 4:14 pm +0000 12/2/99, Jim Sterne wrote:

> >

> >Every time they doubled their capacity (both servers and

> >pipes) they doubled their pageviews. They both said that

> >people have a time limit when surfing. People will spend

> >only X minutes at your site and if you can show them 6

> >pages in that X minutes, that's all they'll look at.

> >However, if you can serve up 12 pages in X minutes,

> >they will look at 12 pages.

> 

> Absolutely.  That is exactly what has happened here at Multi Media

> Mapping; a bandwidth hike immediately causes a traffic hike. Same

> thing happened (and this really surprised me) when we rearranged

> some servers and moved our main relational database off the primary

> web server and on to a dedicated machine.

> 

> Although the maps didn't go out any quicker, all the local info was

> being retrieved and displayed way faster, with the result that users

> browsed it far more.

> 

> Which begs the question, especially in this group, of how advertisers

> will feel about such things.  If Joe User comes to our site and

> retrieves twice as many pages now we have tuned up our servers, we

> will send twice as many banners, and the many advertisers paying our

> (very moderate) CPM will spend twice as much with us. However, Joe

> user is probably less likely to click on a banner now he is getting

> pages even more quickly.  He is certainly not twice as likely to

> click.

> 

> Hm; maybe we should lower the bandwidth on our advertising-supported

> pages and increase it for our fee-based users :-)   Except that would

> lead to a massive stream of complaints :-(

> 

> Cheers

> Sean

> 

> =============================================================

>

Sean Phelan seanmultimap [dot] com http://www.multimap.com

> phone (within UK): 0171 433 0460      fax (UK): 0171 209 5194

> phone (Int'l):  +44 171 433 0460      fax:   +44 171 209 5194


Nabil Shabka

BiblioTech

631-633 Fulham Road

London,  SW6 5UQ

UK


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