Does the browser read an entire dynamic page each time?

[smoger]

Hi all,.. traffic to my site is exploding so of course I'm looking into saving bandwidth.

A lot of times, I use dynamic asp pages where one file may contain "several pages" within it,.. depending on what the user is doing.. for example.. submitting a form , visiting for the first time, etc.

Now, my question is do browsers download the entire page each time? Or do they just download the code that ends up being used on that particular pageview?

In other words,.. instead of having a dynamic page serving a particular page based on the circumstance, would I benefit from breaking each "step" of the page into seperate files?

thanks!

[coopster]

A lot of it has to do with user's browser settings but there are some things you can do. External style sheets is one idea that comes to mind ...

[FalseDawn]

Make sure your content is gzipped. This link will help you determine:
http: //www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/

Most browsers will cache the bandwidth-sapping things like images and as most html pages are a few K, you'd be looking at serving millions of pages for 10GB of transfer, and that's a lot of pages!