Facebook Faster and Cheaper

It looks like Facebook has put some time into optimizing their web traffic:

On closer inspection, our measurements told us that pages were primarily slow because of network and render time. Our generation time definitely had (and still has) significant room to improve but it wouldn’t provide the same bang for the buck. So we devoted most of our engineering effort towards two goals: drastically cutting down the bytes of cookies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript required by a Facebook page while also developing new frameworks and methodologies that would allow the browser to show content to the user as quickly as possible.

link: Facebook | Making Facebook 2x Faster

Some quick, back of napkin calculations suggest that they have reduced their overall bandwidth used for page transfer by 37%. If this is the case, using their published 200 million logins per day and 60 million status updates, they have reduced their bandwidth cost by over a half a million dollars. In other words, they actually get a return on that investment in year 1. Easy to justify that project. It makes you wonder why they waited so long.

Here are my back of napkin calcs: