An open community 
of Macintosh users,
for Macintosh users.

FineTunedMac Dashboard widget now available! Download Here

Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
What exactly are you guys reading when we post?
#8708 03/04/10 06:07 AM
Joined: Sep 2009
OP Offline

Joined: Sep 2009
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. smirk ]

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

--

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)

Last edited by cyn; 03/16/10 06:56 AM. Reason: Topic moved from the Lounge to FineTunedMac Feedback.
Re: What exactly are you guys reading when we post
Hal Itosis #8713 03/04/10 12:50 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
Likes: 1
Offline

Joined: Aug 2009
Likes: 1
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.


Photo gallery, all about me, and more: www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
Re: What exactly are you guys reading when we post
tacit #8714 03/04/10 01:27 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
Offline

Joined: Aug 2009
what about avatar info? (I know nothing about this, so I'm just throwing that out there.)


MacBook 2.4 Ghz · 4 Gb ram · 10.7.5
stuff I'm interested in
iPhone 4s 7.0.2
Re: What exactly are you guys reading when we post
tacit #8718 03/04/10 07:56 PM
Joined: Sep 2009
OP Offline

Joined: Sep 2009
Originally Posted By: tacit
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.

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




Originally Posted By: tacit
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.

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).

Re: What exactly are you guys reading when we post
roger #8723 03/05/10 02:40 AM
Joined: Aug 2009
Likes: 1
Offline

Joined: Aug 2009
Likes: 1
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.


Photo gallery, all about me, and more: www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
Re: What exactly are you guys reading when we post
tacit #8724 03/05/10 03:15 AM
Joined: Aug 2009
Offline

Joined: Aug 2009
okey doke!


MacBook 2.4 Ghz · 4 Gb ram · 10.7.5
stuff I'm interested in
iPhone 4s 7.0.2

Moderated by  alternaut, cyn, dkmarsh 

Link Copied to Clipboard
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.4
(Release build 20200307)
Responsive Width:

PHP: 7.4.33 Page Time: 0.020s Queries: 26 (0.015s) Memory: 0.5954 MB (Peak: 0.6689 MB) Data Comp: Zlib Server Time: 2024-03-28 10:57:14 UTC
Valid HTML 5 and Valid CSS