Greg Miller wrote: >>> Last I heard, the industry averages were supposed to be something >>> like 3:1 pageviews-to-users ratio and 50% repeat visitors. So the >>> number of favicon 404s would be approximately 1/6 of the total number >>> of pageviews. >> >> That would only be true if every site consisted of just a single page, >> which is clearly untrue. From what I've read so far, the current >> implementation requests the favicon once for each domain. > > Erm, no. It would be *untrue* if each site consisted of a single page.
Yeah, sorry, I misread what you'd written. Is this per web site, or per domain name? I'm not sure how relevant those figures are anyway, they certainly don't gell with the patterns I've seen on sites on which I have access to the statistics. There are few sites these days on which you can navigate to what you what by visiting just three pages, and those on which you can are likely to be part of a number of sites hosted on a single domain (i.e. geocities.com). I imagine the above industry averages are largely influenced by behemoths like AOL and MSN. >> account the average number of images/stylesheets/javascript appearing >> in external files. As this should be based on resources requested, not >> pageviews as that is misleading. > > I thought I was quite clear about the fact that this was only a matter > of pageviews. I don't know of any good web-wide stats for requests or > bandwidth, and I suspect no useful stats could be determined since > things vary too widely. Personally I think in this case specific examples would be far more useful than industry averages anyway, as they are far to swayed by huge hosts. >> You should probably also take into account the % of /favicon.ico >> associated with domains, as those wouldn't appear as 404s (i.e. >> Netscape Enterprise Server seems to come with one as default). > > > > From a bandwidth perspective, those are even worse than 404s. As I > mentioned before, averages are no consolation to the people getting hit > with worst-case scenarios. But I thought part of your argument was about 404 errors in weblogs, these wouldn't occur when favicons already exist, so in that case its no more a bandwidth problem than any other image. The 404 issue is the major problem with this, requesting resources that don't exist, rather than the bandwidth. ian.
