I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied. Here is the email: I am happy to try and answer any questions you have. The changes we make to the site from time-to-time are usually informed by a desire to either reduce the overall bandwidth demands of serving the site, or improve its utility. At its heart it is a placeholder...
  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    9 days

    I’m very curious about how much bandwidth it consumes. Even with the small amount of content, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s over 1Gbps.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      9 days

      I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s over 1Gbps.

      The site is about 2kB. In order to consume 1Gbps it would need about 62 000 visitors every second, assuming no one uses any kind of cache or anything. Or 5,4 billion visitors daily. Not impossible, but I’d guess the real number isn’t quite that much.

      • notgold@aussie.zoneEnglish
        7 days

        Can you break out your math? I’m thinking when you add in all the handshakes, rst, retransmits it would be high but I’m too lazy to do math myself

        • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          6 days

          I didn’t take any overhead in account, just checked that the site itself was a bit under 2kB worth of data. 1 gigabit / 2 kilobytes = 62500, so in order to consume 1Gbps you’ll need about that 62k visitors every second. Handshake is few hundred bits and other overhead is pretty neglible, but those are still not zero so I just rounded it down for a rough ballpark number.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        9 days

        I was thinking more about automated usage. There’s probably a lot of devices that hit it to check for internet connectivity. The linked article says that most of the traffic is automated and they saved bandwidth by putting some content in a JS file (since most of the automated hits don’t download or run the JS).

    • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
      9 days

      probably a hell of a lot. I do a lot of travelling for work and thus I’m always connecting to open wifi spots (with a vpn naturally) and many times my browser won’t pick up the capture portal automatically so I use example.com or neverssl.com to trigger the capture portal. It’s also the site I use to a very quick/dirty internet test.

      I imagine most people use it the same way.

    • milliams@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9 days

      I was going to be rude, but I thought I’d just do you the courtesy and paste the relevant section from the article:

      As it tends to be heavily trafficked, the overall bandwidth is a key consideration, and to that end one of the changes we made this week was to split the page content into a more basic page, augmented by a separate Javascript file with additional content beyond that. Since most of the traffic to the site is automated it tends not to fetch the Javascript file, reducing overall data requirements.

      They’re using JS to reduce the load.

      • urushitan 漆たん@kakera.kintsugi.moeEnglish
        9 days

        Yeah specifically the JS holds translated versions of the sentence “This domain is for use in documentation examples without needing permission. This is not a service; avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.” The raw HTML returns just that + CSS. The JS injects translations of that sentence in multiple languages