population of AW?

Whether open tabs slow down the whole connection depends on whether the content in the open tabs is static or changes.

If you have streaming videos or music open, or an interactive game, yes, they'll slow down everything. If you open a page of AW to read a whole thread, once it's open and all the posts displayed, no more data is gallumphing back and forth, so it won't cause any slowdown.

Think of an internet connection as a tunnel. The tunnel's size is its total bandwidth. With a high-speed connection, it's a big tunnel. Using DSL, it's smaller. For dial-up, it's substantially smaller.

Each window you have open divides your bandwidth tunnel into equally-sized lanes. Each tab within a window divides that window's lane into narrower lanes of equal size. How much traffic--images, text, music, movies, whatever--you can receive and how fast depends entirely on the size of what you're receiving and on how wide the part of the tunnel it's using is.

Text is tiny and can easily speed through a very narrow lane. (This always generates a great cartoon-like mental image for me.) Sound and images are bigger--think of moving a huge painting or statue through a tunnel, or a symphony orchestra or rock band with equipment and roadies, without leaving your lane. Moving images with sound, like movies or games, are even bigger; your lane of the tunnel has to accommodate a theatre-sized screen, plus cast and crew in the hundreds.

So it's not so much the number of tabs you have open that causes slowdowns but the content on those open tabs.

The analogy isn't perfect, but it puts it in a framework that even I, a low-tech person, can understand.

Maryn, who's shared versions of this many times