CONNECT LESS lest you go connectless
Ana Julia Abad
Distance Internet Training & Consulting January 1997
This paper is based on the premise that the Internet community can collectively benefit from a reduction in individuals' connect time. As it is, fast connections are not the norm, and otherwise valuable resources, like multimedia information, and search applications are nearly unreachable to many, due to an impressive growth of the user population, thus traffic, among other causes. Admitting that other factors, like servers and communications, also affect response time on the Net, we must do our part, facilitate its availability, not take it for granted and above all, "Connect Less". This logic will stay valid for so long as the web lures the publication of more and more information which in turn attracts more and more global users.
Some aspects in the paper agree with a good netiquette conduct, but most of the tips, basically, just do not oppose important rules of netizenship. Part of the material here, could be described as plain common sense, of which you have a lot, but additionally, there have been put together a range of experiences, which will help you save time and money, while decreasing congestion on the Internet.
To provide a set of generic guidelines which will help users reduce connection time on the Internet, without depriving them of benefits already being obtained, or expect to gain, by its use. Those users with access via a dialup account from an Internet service provider are the ones likely to benefit most directly from these rules.
While all the following arguments may not be applicable to your own particular case, you can be motivated by at least some of the known advantages to "Connect Less":
When you first start as an Internet user, typically you are exposed to someone else's election of Internet software; these programs are not necessarily the best option around. As you grow in confidence, do try to inform yourself about other products, through articles or independent reviews on the Internet itself; there are many products to choose from, in the commercial software group, in the shareware, freeware, and even public domain group. Once you reach a decision, go ahead and allow yourself a better set of programs. An important point here is, there are incredibly stable programs on the freeware and shareware arena, some are so robust that simply cannot be over powered by commercial programs; I have had to quit using commercial software for which I had paid $100.00, in favor of a great piece of freeware :-(. This of course, is not always the case.
Make sure your software is configured with the right parameters for your specific situation; if you do not feel confident enough, call your Internet service provider about it, they should help you. This is important as, not having an optimized configuration in place can easily increment your online time by a factor of 2, or more, due to slow transfers and avoidable interruptions.
It is the nature of the Internet to continuously change, generally for the better; the programs with which you access its services are no exception; in fact, the pace here is faster than we would choose it to be, so that three or four months may well be old for Internet programs. All the time, newer releases of the software you use are coming out; almost invariably, more recent versions correct errors contained in older versions; some of these mistakes may be directly or indirectly slowing down your sessions; also, newer releases may improve processes and services, or even assimilate state of the art technology. How often should you upgrade or replace your programs, depends on fallible norms; as a rule of thumb, if you have not done it by the end of six months, give it a thought; certainly, after a year, it is safe to say that you could benefit from a more uptodate program.
Easier said than done!; on the other hand, if you are connecting in the order of 20+ hours a month, it can be to your advantage to have the most recent equipment you can afford, be it a 33,600 bps modem, a 16MB computer memory or more, a hard disk which is below 70% full (golden rule that helps keep the best response time any hard disk is capable of). Going for state of the art hardware can reduce your online time by half or so; you might even fall in a situation where you can recover the investment, through lower bills from your ISP, in just a few months.
Before going on line, write down an organized list of the tasks you would like to accomplish; for instance, consider first browsing the web pages you might have read an article about, and then retrieving that newer version of a program whose URL must be known beforehand; next, uploading the new file for your homepage, sending your queued mail, and collecting your mail, which generally should be the last thing you do before closing your connection, so as to include last minute messages.The plan must contain extra tasks to tackle while the session is on a long file transfer, lest you are tempted to leave the connection unattended.
No matter what your Internet work load is, there is the possibility that you organize most of your sessions, in such a way that you get on the Net at regular times of the day, and days of the week. When establishing your optimal times, take into account, aside from your own needs, your coworkers' access habits, and your provider's peak hours.
What is prime time on the Internet?. There is the regular business hours for those connecting from their work places, which is roughly 09h00 to 17h00; and, there is the 16h00 to 24h00 crowd, made up of those accessing from home. Wait, there is the local time, where you access from, and the local time of the server where the information resides; the majority of ftp servers display their local time after logging in, and other servers have a daytime service implemented at the standard port 13, so you can telnet host 13, and find out their local time. It may even turn out that your ISP encourages its users to connect at their less demand hours, by offering more convenient rates. If you must transfer really long files, consider doing it past midnight, or even just before dawn; it can make the difference between being able to load it or not.
Only the strictly necessary material to follow directions should be read online; the rest, be it your email, files on ftp servers, and the ubiquitous world wide web pages, are best read when you are not connected.
Along with today's trends in information storage and retrieval, the Net can be thought of as an extension to your own reference source, making it meaningless whether a piece of information lies there, in your office, home, own computer, or somewhere on the Internet; when ever you need it, you just fetch it, it will be at your disposition permanently. All this has to influence your downloading habits for the better: leave pages alone, where they are, until you need them; it applies to software too, postpone your transferring it until you are really ready to install, and use it; worse, altogether, you may truly not need it.
The Internet is still far from having everything you need; in fact, some feel that It is not living up to its promise. Regardless, the point is, oftentimes, you will be better off going to your library, browsing the books on your shelf, or your cdrom library; so, before searching on the Internet for a topic, give it a thought, could it be better covered in some traditional source of information?.
Will I rather head to the publisher's shop to get a current copy of a favorite magazine, than picking it up from a newsstand, on my way home? not at all. The same logic applies when downloading a file on the Internet. For widely known program files, which is what you are going to download anyway, there are generally several file archives mirrored all over the Net; this lightens the pressure that would be inflicted on an only server, where everyone would otherwise have to get the files from, and at the same time giving a better service to users. Having a choice then, use the server nearest you; if unsure, call your provider's support people about most recommendable hosts, they might even have the file themselves at their site, or they may start mirroring it.
When downloading files through ftp, doing a double download (from an anonymous host to your home directory at your ISP's machine, and second, from your ISP's server to your computer), generally demands less total connect time than one sole download (from a public host direct to your station).
It's an old practice in many industries, in which, they transform a product to a compact form or lighter weight, basically for the sake of transportation and storage economics; at its final destination, and for it to be used, the product must be returned to its original state, to be consumable; a version of this practice has been widely adopted in the computer industry too, and for the very same reason. As such, on the Net you often see compressed files which because of that, take less time to transfer, and less space to store in a hard drive or floppy. When given a choice, select the zipped files (with zip extensions) to download; once you have the file, it needs to be decompressed with any one of the available programs, such as unzip, which can be downloaded itself; you can also call your provider for an appropriate decompression utility program, as there is a handful of compression methods, with their matching decompression tools.
Having the exact host domain, path and name of the file you want to retrieve, you can use the ftp client program command line execution mode, or make a direct browser request, instead of navigating about on the server; in any case, you can formulate your request offline, and once you are online, download the file with a single keystroke, rather than going through the usual dialog of an anonymous session, or the several layers of pages at the web server. Many ftp programs support the command line mode option, if yours does not, it is time to change to one that does support it.
You don't go to the post office to write your letters, fair enough; why would you dial up your Internet service provider, and then type your message? it is just plain wasteful. You can telnet your ISP's computer, probably a unix server, and use one of their mail clients to type your outgoing mail, nothing wrong, except that all the time you will be connected. Also, after dialing up, you may run your own mail client and begin typing your messages, to be immediately sent, when through; again, this is wasteful, notwithstanding the computer power used is your own, not your provider's, your clock is ticking. Type your messages and replies at the comfort of your own computer, and do it offline.
For later pickup. Yes, instead of taking, your letters, to the post office, let your mailman pick them up at a certain time and deliver them to the office; that is also exactly how your outgoing messages are going to be posted: queued, for later pickup and delivery by a client program of your own; opposed to first uploading your message and then, telnetting your provider's host machine to have it picked up by a mail client on the remote computer.
If everybody went to the post office to pick up his mail, we would soon have a crowded and deficient mail delivery service, while the existing postmen and their little trucks would be idle, even out of a job. Why not let your client program collect your mail?, instead of using your providers's programs at their server.
Most likely, you get it daily and read it at home; perhaps, drop by a public library on occasions, for searching specific publications. It so happens that on the Net, we often have an alternative to sign up for discussion groups which mail out their postings, against the possibility of monitoring newsgroups on the same subject, which is like going to your library daily, for regular reading. Subscribing to special interest groups on mailing lists is, usually, gentler on the Net than Usenet news reading; consequently, it is preferable to signup through the corresponding listserv address. If you cannot do without Usenet on some topic, you can always rationalize its use by saving articles to disk, for offline news reading.
The just browsing pastime can easily nullify the effects of all the above recommendations put together. Browsing the web may be really convenient for a good understanding of the Internet and for finding useful material, or as a pastime; however the plain fact is that it is tough on the Net. As it is, the web is the Internet application which demands the most bandwidth; even if its underlying protocol, http, is optimized for connection utilization, opening a connection each time you click on a link instead of maintaining a session on between your unit and the server, resulting in a rationalization of servers infrastructure; this, however, does not translate into less online time, because the clock is always ticking between clicks.
Most, if not all, of the Internet services can be reached by email. In fact, using email for information served on ftp, archie, gopher, usenet, and the www is the way of accessing the Net for many users; email can be regarded as the poor one's Internet, and the potential to be the conscious one's Internet is there. Use email alternatives for as many needs on the Internet, as possible. In this direction, I can point you to a priceless paper on the topic (both in the true sense of the word and for it being precious ;-), Dr. Bob's Internet by E Mail, request it with a message containing the line: send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email. *Your comments and suggestions for additions or corrections are most welcome.