I have been in a big argument with my father lately.
He insists that if many browser windows are left open that they will use up bandwidth and slow your Internet connection.
I maintain that they will not. While your computer may slow down some, from the memory being used, once a page is loaded there is no longer any data being transfered and no effect on the connection speed. For example, I could unplug my modem and the windows I have open would be unaffected. The only time where it would make a difference is if you had some sort of streaming content or if a site were constantly updating.
Only if the open browser instance is actively loading content, either through active scripting or some other means. If it’s just sitting there displaying a static page, then no.
I agree with what QED said.
There are many pages that will use up bandwidth but most do not and most of the ones with active content own use a very minimal amount.
I leave CBSSPORTSLINE.com up in Gamecenter. This continues to use band width every few seconds. This is one of the worst examples.
Straightdope, Google, Wikipedia are examples of static pages that use no bandwidth after loading.
What may be more important here is what browser are you using? If you are using IE, then you have several instances of IE running, each one soaking up system resources, and degrading your system.
On the other hand, if you are using Mozilla, Firefox or Opera, each with the ability to open several tabbed windows within one browser instance, you system resources are not as severely degraded than with using IE.
If you want a good way to verify this to yourself as well as prove this to your father do the following:
If you are on a dial-up connection, look at the icon for it in your system tray. It should show two little computers. They light up as your computer communicates with your ISP. Load a page and see them light up. When the page is done loading, they don’t light up. No light up means no communicaion, which means no bandwidth being used. Open up multiple browser windows and look at the lights on that icon.
If you are on a broadband connection, install a program that will monitor your incoming and outgoing network traffic. Zonealarm or Sygate Personal Firewall will do the trick, but you could also install a packet sniffer as well. Zonealarm and Sygate will have icons that do the same thing as the Dial-Up Networking icon. They light up when there is communication with the ISP. Use them the same way. If you decided to use a packet sniffer, it will show technical information for every packet sent and received by your computer. No info means no traffic, and therefore no communication… meaning no bandwidth being used.
Dragwyr’s comment about watching the networking icon light up also works for braodband connections. But by default, the icon isn’t displayed for non-dialup connections.
To see the icon on any connection, go to Control Panel, the Network Connectins, then right-click the desired connection (typically named “Local Area connection”) and choose “Properties” from the menu. On the dialog page near the bottom is a checkbox labeled “Show icon in notification area when connected”. Check that and [OK].
I have used both. But system resources are not the problem. We have to computers on a router sharing a cable modem, so my resources have no effect on him. He believes that my having many windows open is degrading his connection speed. He keeps insisting that he looked it up and found an article on Cnet that confirmed his suspicions, I think that the article he read was probably referring to a slowing of the computer, not the net connection, and he confused the two.
Can anyone link me to a more authoritative source? I fear that he will not respect the judgments of some random people on a BBS I frequent (despite the fact that I love and respect all of you so very much ).
Hah, yeah right. IE with 20 windows open uses up about 30MB of memory. Mozilla with 20 tabs open uses something like 200MB. IE is perfectly capable of sharing resources between browser windows.
Depends on how you open them. If you open a new window from an existing window, they’re both threads in the same process and can share resources. But if you just start up a new window from whole cloth, they’re different processes.
A good question to ask is what exactly is the data being transferred after the page is loaded. If you can’t answer that, Occam’s Razor tells us that there is no data being transferred.
I have showed him that no data is being transferred, but he still does not believe me.
I think that he thinks a connection to a web-site is something like a phone call, even if both parties are silent and not transfering any data, the line is still tied up, being reserved for that call. So, I assume, he probably believes that for every page you have open a part of your bandwidth is reserved for communication with that site, thus the more pages you have open the more bandwidth is reserved and less remains available for other uses.
This is one of those rare occasions where the experience of youth is more valuable than age. Tell him you’re more familiar with the technology, there’s absolutely no reason that what he says is true, and than if he doesn’t beleive you, well, you’re younger and everyone knows that younger dudes know more about the internet than old dudes.
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