Actual bandwidth usage

[Mike Miller]

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Shing-Fat Fred Ma wrote:

> Now that my high speed service provider has started to charge based on
> the number of bits transacted over my line, I've gotten stingy about
> bandwidth (by which I mean byte count, not bits per second).  I never
> realized how costly it was to use a graphical interface like VNC (and
> probably true of most graphical interfaces). Just having a cursor
> blinking costs in the order of Kbytes/s.  Just moving the pointer also
> costs this much, even with tightvnc's local cursor handling.  And this
> is with tight encoding, compresslevel=9.  How very sad.  An ssh session
> seems to be the way to go, if you don't need the graphical aspect.


Thanks for that info, Fred.  I've been thinking about using VNC with a
mobile PalmOS device (Treo), but now I think I'll try an ssh client
instead.  I can pay by the minute (GSM) or by the megabyte (GPRS), but the
GPRS service is always-on and faster.  When paying $5/MB, you want to save
every byte you can!

Mike