Colored Backgrounds
Steve Lamb
pmmail@rpglink.com
Sat, 11 Dec 1999 16:16:07 -0800
Saturday, December 11, 1999, 8:22:41 AM, David wrote:
> Never quite understood this "wasted bandwidth" thing.
Imagine getting 600 messages a day (I do) and having the volume of that
mail doubled from 2Mb to 5-6Mb. Now imagine downloading that on a 56k modem.
It just went from 15 minutes to ~45 minutes. That is wasted bandwidth.
Now imagine sending html mail to a mailing list like, ohhhh,
pmmail@rpglink.com (just to pick one). That 1k message is now a 3k message
thanks to the wonders of HTML. Now, thanks to the wonders of mailing list
technology, that one message is now sent out to 200+ people. It is no longer
1k versus 3k, but 200k versus 600k.
Now imagine the average day in this list is 10 messages a day. That takes
it from 2Mb to 6Mb. Now, fortunately, I have a cable modem so it doesn't take
long for all that to get crammed out the door. The point, though, is that my
pipe does have a limit. My cable provider's pipe to my ISP is only so big.
My ISP's pipe is only so big, etc, etc, etc.
>>CPU and diskspace
> I doubt whether reading HTML e-mail causes the processor much distress ; I
> haven't noticed any steam coming off mine when reading such e-mail.
What about your ISPs mail server that has to handle a few thousand to a
few million of those a day. Now multiply the volume by 2-3.
For example, here are just *my* stats for...
...yesterday:
Exim statistics from 1999-12-10 07:35:15 to 1999-12-11 07:35:15
Grand total summary
-------------------
At least one address
TOTAL Volume Messages Hosts Delayed Failed
Received 1323KB 406 46 13 3.2% 1 0.2%
Delivered 6080KB 2498 293
Deliveries by transport
-----------------------
Volume Messages
address_pipe 57KB 23
local_delivery 1142KB 341
remote_smtp 4882KB 2134
... today, thus far:
Exim statistics from 1999-12-11 07:38:01 to 1999-12-11 16:08:17
Grand total summary
-------------------
At least one address
TOTAL Volume Messages Hosts Delayed Failed
Received 739KB 248 29 26 10.5% 2 0.8%
Delivered 13MB 5149 261
Deliveries by transport
-----------------------
Volume Messages
address_pipe 196KB 66
local_delivery 524KB 178
remote_smtp 12MB 4905
... the past 10 days:
Exim statistics from 1999-12-01 07:35:48 to 1999-12-11 16:09:14
Grand total summary
-------------------
At least one address
TOTAL Volume Messages Hosts Delayed Failed
Received 13MB 4122 180 111 2.7% 27 0.7%
Delivered 54MB 22473 398
Deliveries by transport
-----------------------
Volume Messages
address_pipe 554KB 297
local_delivery 11MB 3647
remote_smtp 42MB 18529
Messages received per hour (each dot is 5 messages)
---------------------------------------------------
As you can see, as "address_pipe" increases (that is mail that is piped
through another program, in this case, the list server) the remote_smtp stats
go, the remote_smtp stats skyrocket. Bet'cha didn't know that the PMMail
list generates the better part of 40Mb on average every 10 days, did you?
HTMLize it all, it becomes something between 80Mb and 120Mb.
> As for disk space; multi-gig drives are now so cheap and commonplace that I
> would suggest that even if all the e-mail you received was in HTML format
> the percentage of your disk that it would occupy the be totally
> insignificant.
Again, what about your ISP? Also you're making the mistake of thinking
that everyone has as ready access to hardware as you do. Think outside the
box, or, in this case, your country.
>>without adding more than very marginally to information content.
> I think that's a bit sweeping.
No, it is not.
> If I wish to send a client a properly formatted document to make it easy to
> read I may well use different fonts, different colours, tables etc. This is
> obviously not possible in ASCII..
Tell all the authors who write how many books in simple black text on an
off-white background. It is possible in simple ASCII, it has been for
thousands of years.
> Oh dear, there I go again, wasting bandwidth ...
We're talking HTML mail, en mass, for everything.
> There is no doubt that a lot depends upon your ISP and the connectivity that
> he has around the globe.
O-bing. You're starting to think globally here. Remember, up until
recently some countries in the pacific, MAJOR countries, had a blazing fast
connection of a *single* T-1. Yes, that's for the whole country. IIRC, that
country was called "Australia."
> My provider offers an excellent service in this respect and I would suggest
> that you tried his services if I didn't think that the telephone calls to
> the UK might make it somewhat uneconomic ...
You're finally catching on.
> In general the designer of any business Web site will attempt to make the
> home page load as fast as possible for exactly the reasons you suggest.
*cough* Bullshit *cough*
Tell that to all the designers that have Flash intros on their page.
> Of course there are exceptions to this and in these cases the designers must
> presumably believe that the impact produced by the lovely flash animations
> or whatever more than compensate for those that get bored and go away .
"Exceptions" isn't the word when the split is about 50:50. Browsing from
work I hit a lot of sites that are slow and trust me, browsing from work is
about as fast as it is going to get.
> OK, that's fine - most of the time I do the same thing but, for reasons I
> have tried to explain that, I see no reason to ignore or castigate others
> that embellish their communications with HTML.
For reasons I have explained, there is. You're only looking at your small
plot of the 'net, your computer. You're not scaling all of that up to the
rest of the 'net as a whole.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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