Webpages that automatically refresh are bad for download limits
Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 05:55pm
As soon as I got up this morning I checked the radar image of the rain around Melbourne courtesy of the Bureau of Meteorology in order to determine if I was going to ride my bike or catch the bus to work today. As I wanted to know how it was changing I checked the looped version which led me to the decision to catch the bus.
I did this on one of my Linux boxes which is on 24/7 and did not close the window which has been ok in the past as it only downloads new images every 15 minutes. Unfortunately around half an hour after I did this something went wrong and it started to fetch the images multiple times a second and I did not notice this until I arrived home. An average of 40 kilobytes a second for almost nine hours is over a gigabyte that needlessly comes out of my 12 gigabyte (on-peak) per month cap :(
