Can too many websites open concurrently drain bandwidth

Question

I have approximately anywhere between 80 - 100 tabs open at any given time. I do this because I have a lot of things to read, and often travel without having internet, so by using hibernate can often read withnout needing an internet connection.

My current roommates are accusing me of making the internet go slow, although it is a satellite internet connection which the signal strength changes often due to our location and the construction of our apartment.

I am certain that my many tabs are having no effect on the bandwidth being used for the following reasons.

1. The majority of tabs I have open are plaintext, and have already loaded.

2. All the tabs I have are already loaded, and as I understand it will not refresh automatically after a connection is closed, unless I manually establish that connection by refreshing.

3. I use an adblocker, so there are no ads or dynamic content being pushed through.

4. Even for sites that do update constantly, for example Facebook or Gmail, as all the heavy content such as sounds and images have been loaded, it is a very very small amount of text data that is being pushed through, not enough to have any noticeable impact on the bandwidth being used.

I use Firefox 4 if that makes a difference.

Can anyone confirm my reasoning with the points above and perhaps provide additional information, or if I am wrong explain why?

Thankyou

Answer 1

Like I said, there shouldn’t be any real impact on your bandwidth in the scenario you described; a trickle at most.

What you’ll want to do to confirm it is to install a bandwidth monitoring program. Then you can view your bandwidth usage and see any spikes—or low/no usage as the case may be.

(Then you can show your roommates the graphs and rub their noses in it.) :-D