I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied. Here is the email: I am happy to try and answer any questions you have. The changes we make to the site from time-to-time are usually informed by a desire to either reduce the overall bandwidth demands of serving the site, or improve its utility. At its heart it is a placeholder...
The site is about 2kB. In order to consume 1Gbps it would need about 62 000 visitors every second, assuming no one uses any kind of cache or anything. Or 5,4 billion visitors daily. Not impossible, but I’d guess the real number isn’t quite that much.
I was thinking more about automated usage. There’s probably a lot of devices that hit it to check for internet connectivity. The linked article says that most of the traffic is automated and they saved bandwidth by putting some content in a JS file (since most of the automated hits don’t download or run the JS).
Can you break out your math? I’m thinking when you add in all the handshakes, rst, retransmits it would be high but I’m too lazy to do math myself
I didn’t take any overhead in account, just checked that the site itself was a bit under 2kB worth of data. 1 gigabit / 2 kilobytes = 62500, so in order to consume 1Gbps you’ll need about that 62k visitors every second. Handshake is few hundred bits and other overhead is pretty neglible, but those are still not zero so I just rounded it down for a rough ballpark number.
Thank you