How Big is Our Bandwidth!

Most 'Continually Cruising' (CC) on British Inland Waterways, are mindful of their Internet bandwidth quota limit. With this concern in mind, we accept the challenge to design webpages accordingly.

CanalLife.co.uk meeting the Bandwidth Challenge:

There is a balance between what is aesthetically pleasing and useful (e.g. images, scripts, links, colour, titles, etc.) and a basic webpage. It is a true saying that "A picture tells a thousand words"!

Talking extreme, a basic webpage consists of a block of text, using two colours: white background and a black text colour, for example. The majority of Internet users would agree that the 'basic extreme' would be no fun at all.

Pages on this website make use of a template. The template consists of the page's structure, images, navigation links, sponsor's adverts (such as Google) and scripts. The template soon becomes obvious as you navigate through the site as the template are the 'areas' that are constant.

When landing on the site, the 'template' is loaded into the device's (e.g. PC, Apple, iPad) cache or memory. Each page after that simply downloads its 'unique' information.

See: Explanation of Cache - there are lots of variables to consider.

As an example, the template for this site is 83KB in size. This page, with it's text content added to the site's template, totals 89KB. Therefore only 6KB extra of bandwidth is downloaded to view this page (provided you have landed on this page via the link from the front page of course.)

 

What is the average size of a webpage on the Internet?

According to Sreeram Ramachandran, a Google Software Engineer, after analysing 4.2 Billion webpages, he found that the average webpage size was (in May 2010) 320KB.

 

How much bandwidth does a Jigsaw on this site use?

	The html page that you see when you download a jigsaw's webpage is aroung 85K (if the the template of 83KB is already downloaded into your cache - then the extra bandwith you will be downloading is 2KB).
	There are two further Shockwave Flash files that need to be downloaded. (Note: These two Shockwave Flash files contain the code, or the 'engine', for the jigsaw for it to work.) One (file name e.g. 'a.swf') is 36KB and is used for every jigsaw, i.e. it will be downloaded into your cache after the 1st jigsaw. Subsequent jigsaws will retrieve the a.swf file from your cache, negating the need to download the file again. The second Shockwave Flash file (e.g. 'b.swf') is around 100KB and each b.swf is specific to the jigsaw, therefore, this file will need to be downloaded - that is unless you wish to restart the same jigsaw, then this file will be in your cache and will not need to be downloaded.
	To clarify, the approximate total download of a jigsaw page is 220KB: minus 83KB the size of the template that is already in the cache minus 36KB if a (one) jigsaw that has already been downloaded, and minus 100KB if you complete the jigsaw for the 2nd or more times
	Once the jigsaw has been downloaded, no more bandwidth is used for the jigsaw to work.