xyzzyyzzyx writes:
"Avantslash is touting a user hosted perl script that, if paired with any web browser with JavaScript, promises to shave crucial bytes off of the standard Slash-based experience, one of which is our very own SoylentNews. Audiences include those with very limited bandwidth, such as those in developing countries with only 2G mobile access or dialup."
(Score: 1, Troll) by Khyber on Thursday March 13 2014, @04:17AM
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/b5U5S6/soylentnews .org [pingdom.com]
See that? The site as-is is under 200kB per page.
What's the point of shaving off relatively nothing in the first place?
Destroying Semiconductors With Style Since 2008, and scaring you ill-educated fools since 2013.
(Score: 1) by VanessaE on Thursday March 13 2014, @05:54AM
Simple. If you only manage to shave off 1kB per page, you're already looking at 5GB/mo less bandwidth for the 5M views/month this site gets now. If Soylent can manage to get to Slashdot-levels of traffic (15M views/mo) and the savings is more substantial, say 25 kB per page, then you're talking about 375 GB/mo in saved bandwidth.
Consider for a moment how much time it would take to send 375 GB, and what else one could do with that bandwidth if it's just being wasted now.
Multiply that again by however much traffic all of the other Slashcode-using sites are getting, combined.
Also consider that not every geek has a particularly fat pipe. A few seconds saved here and there loading pages adds up.
(Score: 1) by Titanium on Thursday March 13 2014, @09:38AM
(375 gigabytes) / (10 (gigabits per second)) =
5 minutes
I fail to see your point, and I did not even multiply by the number of nodes serving up the page.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday March 13 2014, @06:02AM
When I do a copy-paste of the current home page into a text editor, then count characters, I get something near 20kB. In other words, if all you had was text, your download would be a tenth of the size. I wouldn't call a 90% reduction "relatively nothing".
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Thursday March 13 2014, @06:21AM
It's "nothing" on a high-speed connection. On a dial-up connection, that could take more than 30 seconds to download. Actually, compression and caching would improve that a bit, but still...
And god help you on a 2G connection, going HALF that speed AT BEST.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hankwang on Thursday March 13 2014, @06:40AM
What's the point you ask? During my daily train commute, I pass through an area with patchy 2G coverage, with just a few kB/s transfer rate. At work (it's on a "high tech campus", well, well) it depends on which side of the building I am in.
And the layout is more suitable for mobile rendering. Although for SN the layout is manageable on modern mobile devices, you should remember that it was really written for slashdot, with SN support as a new feature.
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 1) by egcagrac0 on Thursday March 13 2014, @01:26PM
About 2 minutes per page load when the display says "AT&T E" instead of "AT&T 4G", that's the point.
Also, some of us like to save that quarter second even when it says 4G.