Kilobytes downloaded per day: poss causes for MAJOR drop?

[babble]

mid august, i went from averaging about 7 million kb/day but since have been at about 800 thousand.

time spent downloading each page went up maybe 30% but pages crawled stayed the same.

apart from the speed issue, don't think we've done anything to trigger this (none of the usual suspects like link structure, errors, sitemap, or new code).

any other ideas? and is this disastrous for my indexing or am i over-reacting.

thanks for your help

[EricaMcGillivray]

30% site speed is a lot. Google says it's a factor in rankings; though we don't know how much.

Did you get hit by Panda and duplicate content?

[babble]

nope. wasn't a panda thing (our general indexing problems predate panda).

and, interestingly, our search traffic didn't actually decrease in the weeks that followed the crawl volume drop, so maybe it's not a big deal. still seems not good.