I’ve been trying out the Pandora, an online music station that plays music similar to any artist you type in.  You type in “Beatles” and you will hear a song from the Beatles, then a song from a similar artist.  You can rate the song you hear to get better suggestions.  Cool concept.

 Unfortunately for me, I’m having a problem listening to songs. After about the first 5 seconds of the song, it completely cuts out.  No more sound.  Nothing.  So, I did what any person would do: I clicked the Help button, then I went into page load limbo:

http://blog.pandora.com/faq/

Close examination of this page reveals that it is 230,000 bytes in size.  Why so big?  Don’t they realize that 1. Each person who downloads the page is going to wait a while to download the entire page and 2. Their web server must serve all 230,000 bytes of data each and every time? 

Doing the math, I came up with some numbers.  Let’s say they have 1000 page loads (for just that page) per day.  That’s 230,000,000 bytes or 224609 KB or 219 MB.  Okay, that may not seem like alot; however, one must think of more than just bandwidth involved.  The real issue here is that this is a FAQ page that is most likely pulling its data from a database - they would be crazy to have a static page to maintain a FAQ, though it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.  Therefore, there are two levels of processing going on: 1. The database is queried and returns a large dataset, and 2. the web server serves the results down to the user. 

Why not break up the FAQ?  Why not put the questions on one page and the answers on another?