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I have been tasked with reducing the size of a page load event.

Using various tools (Mozilla Developer Tools -> Network) I can see that the "Transferred" Column has 8mb in it, and the "Size" column is only 1.5mb

What I do not know, and cannot seem to find references to is this:

  1. What is the difference between the two?
  2. What exactly is measured in the "Transferred" Data?
  3. How can I reduce the amount of "Transferred" Data?

3 should be fairly easy...if I can figure out 2. 1 is just because I'm curious. But once I know what is actually being tracked by the transferred data measure, I will know how to reduce it.

Yes, the website says "the number of bytes that were actually transferred to load the resource." Is that Client to Server? Server to Client? Server Database? What is that?

Nevyn
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  • I don't think that is your problem, i.e. the slow load time is not because of that "Transferred" size. As you can see in comments [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31508885/why-transferred-bytes-are-bigger-than-size-bytes-in-firefox-dev-tools), this might even be a bug on Firefox side. I think you better look on other things that might cause big load time, mostly loops and/or database queries. – Shadow The GPT Wizard Jun 28 '16 at 08:47
  • Actually...I know exactly where the slow load time is. And that's not what my task was. My task was to reduce the transferred data to load the page. To do that, I'm trying to Identify the transferred data, because I can't FIND it!! – Nevyn Jun 29 '16 at 13:08
  • So you mean the task is reduce bandwidth, OK. Anyway like I said the 8mb appears to be fake, result of a bug. And one thing for sure, this is about amount of bytes transferred from the server to the client. – Shadow The GPT Wizard Jun 29 '16 at 13:23

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Ok. In the end it took a lot more tools, but I was finally able to figure out what was going on. Via a combination of WireShark and Fiddler I was able to figure out where all the extra data was actually coming from.

To answer the original Questions:

  1. ok actually I still dont know what the difference is between the two, but it didn't end up being important
  2. This is the physical size of the accumulated packets transmit to the client machine. Or at least, its supposed to be, apparently there are a few bugs with some of the measuring tools and no real standard on what to measure. Some tools include the headers, some dont. And some of them have a bug which doubles the measured data for some types of transmissions.
  3. Via a combination of enabling dynamic compression in both the web config and the windows features, and removing the "View State" flags from some of the controls.

In the end, there was a hidden field on the page "_VIEWSTATE", which contained something like 7 Mb of data in text format. This was apparently a base64 string representation of nearly every control on the page...and wasn't even being used. In addition to that, I discovered that even though I configured it in the web.config, the Windows Feature which controlled the dynamic compression still needed to be activated and installed. Doing both of these steps dropped the transferred data from 10Mb to 500k.

Other Links

Nevyn
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