AJAX Can Save Bandwidth

Macintosh rumor site MacRumors has published a report about the bandwidth saved by using an AJAX enabled page to update content during Macworld 2006 in San Francisco. Previously MacRumors, along with many other sites, would use page refreshing to reload the page every 30 seconds which of course causes increased server activity when thousands of people are viewing the site. By using AJAX to deliver updated content MacRumors was able to reduce the resources needed.

We peaked at approximately 103,000 simultaneous web visitors and 6,000 IRC viewers during the Keynote speech and transmited over 32 GB of data in a three hour period. If not for the efficiency of the MacRumorsLive AJAX update system, the same webcast would have required approximately twice as many servers and would have had to transfer almost 6 times as much data (196 GB).

AJAX really is more than fading yellow boxes or the latest buzzword, used correctly it can save bandwidth which in turn saves money.