> The problem here is not sites that have favicons but sites that dont. > Instead of proactively going and asking "hey do you have a favicon i can > use" for each and every web page you load, you ask it *only* when the > webpage that you load says, "hey load this favicon, please".
> > So if you have a favicon, thats good for your bandwidth. But if you > don't its bad. And the majority of sites don't have one. Ok, let's redo my math. A request for /favicon.ico on a standard Apache install will generate 30 bytes for the request and about 400 bytes for the 404 response. If you have 100 users generating 1000 pageviews, that amounts to (30 + 400) * 100 = 43kB. It's only times 100 because each user only asks for it once per session as far as I can tell. Now, "touch favicon.ico" and you eliminate about 1/4 of that traffic by suppressing the error document (plus it doesn't fill up your error logs). So a reasonable setup gets you about 32kB per 100 users. And you know what? Apache responds to every request with a "Server:" and "ETag:" header. On 1000 requests you know how much bandwidth that's going to consume? 68kB. More than TWICE what the favicon.ico consumes. And I doubt much of anything uses either of those header fields. So when it comes down to it, there are tons of ways to waste bandwidth. "favicons.ico" is one way, but it is by no means the biggest. It's really much ado about nothing. --Mike
