I run Net Monitor all the time [as it's also handy for observing data transfer on my LAN.] For a long time now i've noticed that -- when posting messages (be it here or any message board) -- a huge amount of something is being "sent".

I have Net Monitor set to show 'receive' in green and 'send' in red... and (when posting) the red graph is huge compared to the green... maybe 5-times larger. So i look at Safari's Activity window to see how many bytes the page has (let's say 80K). So what from my computer that measures 5-times that are you reading? Entire cookie file? Entire history file? Entire bookmarks file?

What then? [300 to 400K seems to be a bit more than my message contains. ]

Edit: actually, this site isn't that bad... but macnn and macosxhints seem to read a boatload of info from my Mac.

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Edit 2: Ha! Over at macosxhints i just typed "test test test" into a quick reply box and entered it. Not much showed up in the red/send area... so i hit Edit and deleted the tiny message. Upon clicking the delete button, the page reloaded... and a huge red blob strolled across Net Monitor's graph. Easily about 200KB.

just wondering. (what and why)

Edited by Hal Itosis (03/04/10 01:21 AM ET)

200K is a lot to send for a simple message. Even things like cookies wouldn't account for that; that'd be one hell of a whopping cookie file.

HTTP POST sends a fair amount of overhead, and I would assume that would account for some of the information. The specific data that UBB.threads sends include:

- Date
- Time
- Board name
- Board number
- Post thread ID number
- Post parent ID number
- MD5 hash of the post, presumably to make sure it was sent correctly
- Post body, Unicode encoded
- Subject
- Icon ID
- Codes for the checkboxes (watched topics and so on)
- Encoded URL of the redirect page after the post is made
- Option value for the Markup popup

All that shouldn't amount to nearly 200K of data; in fact, I'd be surprised if it doubled the size of the text body itself.

what about avatar info? (I know nothing about this, so I'm just throwing that out there.)

No, not just the FTM portion... i meant the entire ~/Library/Cookies/Cookie.plist

I keep mine trim, and it's 140K (at the moment). I bet mine is small compared to folks who never trim theirs:

ls -lh ~/Library/Cookies
-rw-r--r--@ 1 halito halito 136K Mar 4 14:31 Cookies.plist





Okay thanks. As indicated, this forum seems (relatively) reasonable.

That macosxhints test i did had exactly "test test test" in the message. (their config refuses posts with less than 10 chars). When i deleted that tiny message, i saw a lot of data going out (almost like when i email a photo, or upload a file).

The avatar settings are stored in your profile, so when you post, the avatar info is picked up from your profile, which is stored in the database. It isn't taken from your local machine, so there's no network traffic from your machine to the FTM machine.

okey doke!