4 ms·

AS HN: How much Bandwidth do you consume per day? How can I reduce mine?

• Kurashi 16y ago
  Opera Turbo reduces the page weight by compressing images and code through their servers. Maybe it can make you reduce your bandwidth consumption. http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/ http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/
  • pornel 16y ago
    Turbo is fantastic for bandwidth-saving. It made browsing bearable when I was on stuck with 115kbit/s connection. 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).
  • bjonathan 16y ago
    +1 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.
• rythie 16y ago
  AdBlock will block all the adverts saving some bandwidth. 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).
• jhferris3 16y ago
  I don't know about chrome, but this sounds like it may help for ff (ImageBlock): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5613/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5613/ 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.
• meric 16y ago
  Use a text browser, like Lynx. http://lynx.browser.org/ http://lynx.browser.org/ 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.
  • kia 16y ago
    Here is more crazy way of saving bandwidth: 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/ http://elinks.or.cz/). This will allow you to browse Internet with bytes of traffic.
    • adbge 16y ago
      In the same vein, you could use NX to do this with a remote X server, so you still have a GUI browser. I know I'm personally not very comfortable in a text browser. 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.
      • enki 16y ago
        horrible advice - NX is bound to suck up heaps of bandwidth even over ssh-gzip - probably more so than just using a local browser.
        • adbge 16y ago
          NX is bound to suck up heaps of bandwidth even over ssh-gzip 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 http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR12B00119
• jdietrich 16y ago
  Change your user-agent to that of a mobile browser - most sites will serve you up a low-bandwidth version.
• user24 16y ago
  When I used to use a mobile dongle to access the net, I disabled images to reduce bandwidth. Unforgivably, some sites didn't work with images disabled.
• dho 16y ago
  If you are a tab-"addict": Close all tabs before closing your browser, so that your browser doesn't have to load unnecessary stuff when starting the next time.
• d_c 16y ago
  If you have access to some kind of server you could try using a compressed socks connection via ssh -CDport user@host that should reduce your amount of traffic. Especially for text transmissions which can be compressed quite good.
• rick_2047 16y ago
  I lived with a 1GB/Month connection for about one and a half year. If you stay clear of too many videos (I think about 1:30Hr of youtube is fine) and have something like FlashBlock I don't see any way in which it will exceed 1GB/month.
  • xenophanes 16y ago
    If you do iphone programming, the xcode update downloads are over a gig. For example.
• kthanx 16y ago
  Download the Opera browser. Turn on Opera Turbo - it is (as I understand it) some of the same technology as Opera Mini, but for the desktop - increased speed and less bandwidth. (The turbo icon is a speedometer on the bottom of the screen)
• Keyframe 16y ago
  Cap your download speed. BW per month you want / time online = new download speed. Just an idea.
• olalonde 16y ago
  I read somewhere that some ISPs bandwidth monitoring is based on self reporting. Meaning that your modem actually sends out your usage data. It might be worth looking into for academic purposes.
• JeremyChase 16y ago
  I feel similarly constrained when traveling and using my limited bandwidth 3G card. I did the following: * 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.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• kd0amg 16y ago
  Disabling Javascript (or using NoScript if you want to be fancy) goes a long way towards making some bandwidth-heavy sites more manageable.
  • omarchowdhury 16y ago
    That would also make those sites unusable.
    • kd0amg 16y ago
      Depends on the site, really. A lot of sites I've seen seem to go overboard with gratuitous Javascript. My school webmail works better if I turn Javascript off, e.g. it will then let me open an email in a separate tab (though for a quick email check between classes/meetings, I'll just use pine). Slashdot and GMail are the only sites I visit regularly that need Javascript to function well, and they're still workable without it.
• w1ntermute 16y ago
  pfSense RRD graph for last 6 months: http://i.imgur.com/NhTyw.png http://i.imgur.com/NhTyw.png 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.
• OoTheNigerian 16y ago
  Thanks dudes! 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.
• rewind 16y ago
  That sounds like a lot of bandwidth if you're not downloading any videos. Is there any chance there are background services (that you know of or that may have been installed by other software) that might be doing a lot of send/receive that you're not aware of?
• xenophanes 16y ago
  I used 4.8 gigs down, 7.3 up, in the last 9.5 hours. 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.
• Terretta 16y ago
  If using Safari, turn on the develop menu, then in the develop menu, disable images. (I have unlimited fast bandwidth, but sometimes like this anyway ... the text web.) I also run Adblock+ on all browsers.
• vijaydev 16y ago
  I have lived with 1 GB/month for nearly 2 years. No images, no ads, no flash. Now on an unlimited bandwidth connection :)
• wanderr 16y ago
  If you don't mind using Firefox, the web developer toolbar extension gives you the ability to toggle images, js, redirects, meta refresh and many other things. Adblock is also great for blocking a lot of crap you'll never want to see even when you do want images and js to load.
• Groxx 16y ago
  1 ------------- By far the best bandwidth meter I've ever encountered is BitMeter: http://codebox.org.uk/pages/bitmeteros 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). 2 --------------- 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.
• bobf 16y ago
  Disable prefetching. In Firefox, here's how: 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.
• sybreon 16y ago
  An alternative: 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.