8 ms·
Is the 2000TB/day number reasonable, or just clickbait? It's all based on coming up with two numbers that when multiplied say that this resource is downloaded
by jsnell 10y ago
Is the 2000TB/day number reasonable, or just clickbait?
It's all based on coming up with two numbers that when multiplied say that this resource is downloaded 73 billion times a day. That's 20 times / day for every internet user (even those using it on a 2G connection once a year). Given a reasonable caching period of 1 month, that'd mean the average user visits 600 different sites a month. That seems like much more than one would expect.
Or to look at it another way, global IP traffic is apparently estimated at 72000 PB/month. That's 2400PB/day. This font alone would then be accounting for 0.3% of all internet traffic, or 1% of all non-video traffic. Again, that's a very high number.
But at least it doesn't appear to be a totally impossible number either, just an awfully implausible one.
- koliber 10y agoBy renaming the CSS file from `font-awesome.min.css` to `fa.min.css` they could save 660GB a day: 73,000,000 sites * 1000 visitors * 10 bytes / 1024^3
- kasparsklavins 10y ago`fa` would basically be free for gzip because the icons use fa as a class name.
- koliber 10y agoThe savings are actually greater, because by modifying the filename, 660GB would be saved in both, the request and the response!
- kalid 10y agoA calculator for you, because I'm in pitch-my-side-project mode ;) https://instacalc.com/50060 https://instacalc.com/50060
- richfnelson 10y agoThat's pretty neat idea. The site's missing a cute calculator favicon though, which destroyed my UX.
- kalid 10y agoHah, I just finished a flat redesign from mid-2000s skeuomorphic interface. Redoing the logo / favicons is that last thing...
- dualogy 10y agoToo bad you didn't have a legacy "flat design" from the early 90s still at hand, saves time when changing trends every 10-15 years..
- kalid 10y agoIronically the site design is 90s-browser friendly (maybe with tables vs. divs) but the new JS features are not. That reminds me, I want to browse the site on lynx and see what happens...
- lmm 10y agoThat's how you can tell flat isn't just a trend - it's going back to what worked, after years of doing rounded corners and drop shadows because we can and never stopping to wonder whether we should. There's a lost decade in web design, but hopefully we're now starting to recover from it.
- kalid 10y agoUX is now undestroyed.
- koliber 10y agoI love this!
- 10y ago
- bryanrasmussen 10y agomy build task makes sure that every file on my site has only one character in the name!
- sorahn 10y agoskip the `min` for production completely. use `fa.css` and if you want the expanded one for development, then you could have `fa.[max|debug|whatever].css`
- the_duke 10y agoI don't know where they came up with the 73 million sites umber, but let's assume there are that many sites using font awesome. Most sites are obscure, and rarely get any visitors at all. Maybe 10 a month, or none. Popular sites that receive a lot of traffic are also visited very frequently by the same user, so the font will be in the cache. In addition, plenty of sites use a CDN for fontawesome. I guess that number is off by several orders of magnitude.
- fortawesome 10y ago73 million sites comes from our friends at Meanpath (their search engine isn't running anymore, sadly). They showed us on 7.3% of websites. Best guess is there are about a billion sites on the internet. Thus, 73 million.
- niij 10y agoWhere did the 1000/visitors/site/day come from? This is what seems unlikely and improbable. This resource is being cached as well, so these numbers do seem obtuse.
- fortawesome 10y agoNot sure on the 1000/visitors/site/day. But we're also on some pretty big sites as well. IIRC, the final number there is higher than what MaxCDN (BootstrapCDN folks) serves. Not by much though. Within an order of magnitude I think (which is pretty accurate for this kind of guesswork).
- Bedon292 10y agoOf those 73 million, how many of them are serving the file themselves, vs pointing to it hosted by someone else? I know you can just point to google directly for their fonts, or unpkg.com for js packages. Is that something people also do for font awesome? Those shared links would greatly increase the cache level, and reduce the number of cache misses, and amount of data served.
- jrapdx3 10y ago
- pixelambacht 10y agoI can put your mind at ease: I took a bit of poetic-mathematic license with that number. I figured that the big sites and the small sites together would average a perfect 1000 fresh-cache vistors a day, but in all probability I'm off by at least 3 or 291 visitors :)
- mark-r 10y agoI think you misunderstand the effect of the long tail. For that many sites the average is going to be tiny. And where did the figure of 73 million come from?
- monochromatic 10y agoIndeed. > If each day 73 million websites serve the Font Awesome WOFF to an average of a thousand visitors who don’t have these fonts in the browser’s cache... This assumption that they don't have the fonts cached is only sensible if each user is unique. But that means that we have 73 BILLION unique users.
- sloanesturz 10y agoNot necessarily: your browser caches a different version of font-awesome for each website you visit. There's no way for it to tell that site1.com/static/font-awesome is the same as site1.com/resources/font-awesome until it makes the HTTP request and downloads it.
- stephen_g 10y agoMany sites use the provided MaxCDN URL though, which would be cached between sites.