Tag Archives: internet

Internet traffic statistics

This is an Economist article about whether the internet can survive rocketing traffic or not. It argues (well) that in fact infrastructure easily keeps up with increasing traffic requirements.

However, there were quite a few cool facts and statistics peppered around the article:

  • YouTube alone generated more traffic in 2006 than the entire internet in 2000! Imagine what it’s like now…
  • It is estimated that 50-60% of all internet traffic today is video. That has already been the case for three years
  • Global internet traffic is between 5 and 8 exabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion (1,000,000,000) gigabytes!

That’s a lot of 1’s and 0’s. It’s going to be fun

We have been using incorrect URLs all this time

I learned a couple of days ago that I was typing in web addresses (URLs) incorrectly. It turns out that there should be a slash (/) at the end of the URL that you enter. When you omit this slash your browser and the server work out the problem – but it takes some time.

This is explained in detail in this article. Here is an example of what is happening:

  1. You ask the server for: http://alistairpott.com
  2. The server says that page doesn’t exist – you mean (note the slash): http://alistairpott.com/
  3. Your browsers says OK and then asks for http://alistairpott.com/
  4. The server sends back the page

It’s not quite this simple (this only applies when you are not referencing a file directly), but the principle is there. You can often see this is happening – go to a site and you will see that once the page is loaded there is a trailing slash in the URL.

Entering the correct address (with a slash) prevents the first 2 steps and can speed things up. How much of a speed up? Probably not much.