Bandwidth, it isn’t all for you.
I love web development best practices. I’m always looking for better, more efficient and more reliable ways of doing things. Gaining that knowledge isn’t enough though, I want to educate others about it. But I often find that it’s difficult to illustrate my point without concrete examples for why it’s better to do something one way instead of another. Well I found a half-decent real-life example today for why optimization is a good thing.
It happened when I was trying to visit a site and noticed a long delay in its loading time. Immediately I realized that iTunes was downloading 3 podcasts (since I have it set to auto update every hour) and in the process monopolizing my home DSL. That’s when it clicked, your site is likely not the only thing coming down the pipe when it’s being loaded. It’s probably coming through at the same time as streaming music, another site or two, and maybe even few file downloads. So really, at any given moment, you probably are coming through at 56k, if you’re lucky.
Something to consider the next time you’re tempted to balk at optimization.