Error in your bandwidth reporting

George Sambataro (wx@pcwp.com)
Sat, 06 Mar 1999 09:21:08 -0500


HI,

I view reports generated by your software at Mindspring and have a
comment/question.

I am testing a Visual Basic program that checks ONLY the HTTP header of a
file (to determine if it has been updated, etc..)

Yesterday, the 5th, I did a test on a pcwp2.zip file in a web /data
directory.  The file size is about 470,000 bytes.

I did 500 requests where the transfer was stopped after ONLY reading the
"small" HTTP header file.  Since I work via modem I was able to confirm
that indeed there was a small transfer in data for each request (1 second
using a modem connection).

The report at

http://www.pcwp.com/stats/stats.day.5.html showed the following line item....

14.78 70.39     22313932      500 | /data/pcwp2.zip

indicating that each download was reported as the full 470K (approx) and
that I has used over 22 meg of bandwidth.

This indicates to me that the reporting system is not really keeping track
of bytes transferred but rather just header requests.

I was hoping to use the check header programming method to save bandwidth,
which it does.... but your reports will not indicate this (and I save no $$
at Mindspring).

Please advise.

Thanks,

George

George Sambataro
President

PC Weather Products, Inc.
Marietta, GA.
wxperson@pcwp.com
WEB: http://www.pcwp.com
770 953-3506