

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

Pardon my asking two questions in one.&#60;p&#62;Is there a way of knowing how much bandwidth you consume in a day/month?&#60;p&#62;Secondly, Internet access here in Nigeria is on the high side $100/month for about 7 GB of bandwidth which is far from enough considering I do not watch any videos online. I was wondering if  there was a way I could reduce my consumption. Say&#60;p&#62;1. Preventing pages I am not presently on from loading anything.
2. preventing the one million images on TC and other sites from loading  as if I do not need all of them everytime I visit.
3. Having a downgraded quality of images open.&#60;p&#62;<p>I looked to see if there is any chrome extension but cannot fine one. This is not a problem for most people but I think it is here. At least for me. Any suggestions will be really appreciated.
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Kurashi
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/>

~~~
pornel
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).

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JeremyChase
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.

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rythie
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).

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olalonde
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_.

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jdietrich
Change your user-agent to that of a mobile browser - most sites will serve you
up a low-bandwidth version.

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meric
Use a text browser, like Lynx. <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
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/>).

This will allow you to browse Internet with bytes of traffic.

~~~
adbge
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
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
_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>

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kthanx
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)

------
Groxx
1 -------------

By far the best bandwidth meter I've ever encountered is BitMeter:
<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.

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w1ntermute
pfSense RRD graph for last 6 months: <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.

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jhferris3
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/>

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.

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user24
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.

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kd0amg
Disabling Javascript (or using NoScript if you want to be fancy) goes a long
way towards making some bandwidth-heavy sites more manageable.

~~~
omarchowdhury
That would also make those sites unusable.

~~~
kd0amg
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.

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sybreon
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.

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vijaydev
I have lived with 1 GB/month for nearly 2 years. No images, no ads, no flash.
Now on an unlimited bandwidth connection :)

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wanderr
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.

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xenophanes
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.

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rewind
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?

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d_c
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.

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Terretta
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.

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bobf
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.

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dho
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.

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Keyframe
Cap your download speed. BW per month you want / time online = new download
speed. Just an idea.

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OoTheNigerian
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.

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rick_2047
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
If you do iphone programming, the xcode update downloads are over a gig. For
example.

