Chapter 8
Netiquette for Information Retrieval

When you retrieve information across the net, you're not interacting directly with other humans. So Netiquette for this activity is fairly simple, and is mostly governed by Rule 4, Don't waste other people's time and bandwidth.

Although time and bandwidth are different -- bandwidth is information-carrying capacity; time is time -- in practice, conserving one tends to conserve the other. Conserving bandwidth is particularly important when you retrieve information from a host or server, because carelessness about your own usage can prevent other people from getting information they need. Only a limited number of people can be connected to a server at any one time. And a server can only transmit a certain amount of information per second. When too many people are trying to download too much information, some users are denied access, and system performance slows down for everyone.

What can you do to prevent that? Here are some simple rules:

• Don't stay logged in when you're not doing anything.
• If possible, log in at off-peak hours.