{"id":366,"date":"2009-06-22T11:53:44","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T15:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=366"},"modified":"2009-06-23T02:35:17","modified_gmt":"2009-06-23T06:35:17","slug":"beware-the-browser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/beware-the-browser\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware the Browser"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I tend to use my browser state (and plenty of tabs) as lightweight bookmarks.\u00a0 This means leaving a couple of browser windows open perpetually.\u00a0 Often my machine is configured to sleep after about 20mins, but in the case of my work laptop it doesn&#8217;t sleep if plugged into the wall (intentional on my part).\u00a0 I don&#8217;t think my usage is atypical &#8211; I would not be surprised if several of my friends have similar usage patterns.<\/p>\n<p>A picture tells a thousand words:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/traffic1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-367\" title=\"traffic1\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/traffic1.jpg\" alt=\"traffic1\" width=\"543\" height=\"340\" \/><\/a>This graph is from DD-WRTv24.\u00a0 You might think &#8220;Ah, Roo&#8217;s just been doing some torrents&#8221; &#8211; but the truth is that almost all of the traffic from June 10th-16th and then the June 21st spike are due to a couple of open browser windows on my laptop (overnight).\u00a0 This was my conclusion last night at 2am when I closed 3 browser windows on my laptop and watch the bandwidth on my WAN port drop to zero bytes.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look back a bit to some more typical usage:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/traffic2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-368\" title=\"traffic2\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/traffic2.jpg\" alt=\"traffic2\" width=\"534\" height=\"332\" \/><\/a>You might have noticed the scale is vastly different.\u00a0 In fact, the usage for the entire month is basically the same as what I was pulling down in a single day.<\/p>\n<p>Granted &#8211; I&#8217;m claiming it was the browser (some page auto-refreshing?) doing this.\u00a0 Checking my web logs indicate that visitors to the websites hosted on lowtek hasn&#8217;t massively spiked this month.\u00a0 It could have been something else as well, but the coincidence of my closing the browsers and seeing the traffic drop is good evidence. [Edit &#8211; I may have been wrong (yes, it happens) see comments]<\/p>\n<p>Consider the possibilities here.\u00a0 If you wanted to be evil, and you were say an ISP &#8211; you&#8217;d ensure that your customers default home page was a nice friendly AJAX enabled launchpad linked to webmail etc..\u00a0 and you&#8217;d put something to cause a slow trickle download cost as long as the user has that page open.\u00a0 This would likely cause a fair percentage of your customers to consume more of their bandwidth cap sooner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I tend to use my browser state (and plenty of tabs) as lightweight bookmarks.\u00a0 This means leaving a couple of browser windows open perpetually.\u00a0 Often my machine is configured to sleep after about 20mins, but in the case of my work laptop it doesn&#8217;t sleep if plugged into the wall (intentional on my part).\u00a0 I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/beware-the-browser\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Beware the Browser&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-soap-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}