3 ms·
> At the scale of Wikipedia (~10 billion pageviews a month), even a single byte saving can mean terabytes worth of bandwidth saved. But does it really move the
by distcs 3y ago
> At the scale of Wikipedia (~10 billion pageviews a month), even a single byte saving can mean terabytes worth of bandwidth saved.
But does it really move the needle anywhere where it matters? If you are serving a million bytes in every response but you manage to trim a single byte from it, I don't think it is going to move the needle anywhere.
Sure it will save a terabyte when you have served a trillion responses. But in a trillion responses you are saving only one terabyte out of an exabyte of responses. That's not much!
- bawolff 3y agoAlso keep in mind that for big web properties bandwidth is sold very differently than it is to normal consumers. In many cases wikipedia probably isn't even paying for bandwidth due to peering agreement. As far as performance goes, i suspect whether a single byte matters depends a lot more on if the extra byte results in the same number of packets or not.