It’s easy to assume (at least for me) that most if not all of my nonprofit customers have been able to acquire a nice broadband connection. So I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been!) when one of my customers wanted to know what the bandwidth usage would be like if they moved their work to Salesforce. They have a shared infrastructure and some stringent requirements for ensuring that a certain amount of their pipeline is available to their constituents.

We considered an onsite usage test – but we would have had to reveal customer data – plus – we’d be making things up – what they really wanted to know was “how much bandwidth will OUR implementation of Salesforce use?”

So -we asked Salesforce -and they provided a LOT of information. Here’s the key points:

Bandwidth Required for Users
Salesforce.com is designed to use as little bandwidth as possible so that the site performs adequately over both high speed, dial-up, and over the air Internet connections.

• While average page size is on the order of 90KB, salesforce.com uses compression as defined in the HTTP 1.1 standard to compress the HTML content before it is transmitted as data across the Internet to a user’s computer. The compression often reduces the amount of transmitted data to as little as 10KB per page viewed due to the lack of image content. The site was designed with minimum bandwidth requirements in mind, hence are extensive use of color coding instead of images. Our average user also is known to view roughly 120 pages from our site per day.
• Our application is stateless, therefore, there are no communication requirements in the background once the page loads like traditional client server applications e.g. Outlook. Therefore once the page loads there are no additional bandwidth requirements till a user queries or writes information to salesforce.com.
• In short, it is difficult to specify customer bandwidth because of the nature of the Internet and individual corporate usage. Network latency, peering issues, bandwidth at upstream providers, users using their Internet connections for other use besides salesforce.com, etc. all affect the perceived performance of the connection and the amount of bandwidth required to keep performance adequate.
• A Salesforce.com deployment of 80 users with 75% of the users concurrently logged in with a think time between transactions of 2 minutes: Avg Bandwidth = 120 * 60 / ( 120 + 2 ) = 59 Kbits/sec

Obviously – your mileage may vary depending on the nature of your connection to the internet as well as what other internet related work you are doing. It’s likely more helpful to know your total bandwidth needs and to understand how they all fit together rather than to know what Salesforce uses by itself.