Written By: Sacha Baron Cohen...
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen
Year:2006
When a web developer or code-monkey creates a website they usually practice some sort of tab indentation to make their work vaguely bearable.
If you don't know what I'm talking about. Here's an example of beauty for a programmer:
<html>
<head>
<title>
This is the page's title
</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
This is a Paragraph within the body of the page
</p>
</body>
</html>
- Princess Layla
<html><head><title>This is the page's title</title></head><body><p>This is a Paragraph within the body of the page</p></body></html>
- WTF is going on here!?
All of those tabs, spaces and line-breaks make code readable but usually have absolutely no effect on how a website will look in a browser. Regardless of this, most websites send along this useless information anyway.
Exactly how much bandwidth does each site's useless whitespace consume?
The answer to this varies between websites. A few are well optimised and remove whitespace before the file is sent. You will be relieved to hear that google's default homepage is one of them (phew, praise google!). You will be equally as relieved to hear that the average myspace profile page sends over 10 times as many wasted bytes than average, which was a massive 57kb (phew, I knew myspace was evil!).
I tallied up the wastages for the most common pages of the 10 most visited sites of the U.S.:
| Site | Total avg per page (kb)* |
Est. hits per day* |
GB Wasted per day* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,187.7 | 18,810,797 | 20.81Gb | |
| Yahoo | 3,901.81 | 42,394,073 | 154.05Gb |
| Myspace | 14,349.90 | 19,421,973 | 259.56Gb |
| Youtube | 9,813 | 22,364,692 | 204.39Gb |
| 146.2 | 18,482,607 | 2.52Gb | |
| Live | 2,223.78 | 21,884,215 | 45.32Gb |
| Ebay | 1,251.42 | 3,440,225 | 4.01Gb |
| Msn | 2,260.48 | 9,280,352 | 19.54Gb |
| Wikipedia | 733.18 | 5,246,631 | 3.58Gb |
| Total wasted bandwidth per day | 713.78Gb | ||
All those tabs sure add up! Over 700 gigabytes of spaces, tabs and line-breaks (carriage returns) are downloaded everyday - and that figure only accounts for the top 10 websites.
*The above data is to be used only as an estimate and was calculated using figures combined from two main sources: Alexa (for site-specific data) and Nielsen//NetRatings (for global internet usage data). Page's % of site's hits is estimated based on Alexa's breakdown by subdomains and general intuition; Est hits per day was calculated using alexa's 'reach' and Nielsen's 'Active Digital Media Universe'. Assumptions were made but all efforts were made to ensure the estimate was accurate. Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. All page samples were taken on 9th Nov 2007. To view detail on each page tested, click here.