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Roughly how much bandwidth should Vanilla actually use then?

blizeHblizeH ✭✭
edited September 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Recently set up a forum just five days ago and it's already amounted to 683mb, which seems quite high for a fairly quiet forum, the total data stored on the entire web server only amounts to 10mb and that includes around 6 months of posts, so how on earth did it manage to rack up 683mb in just five days?

Not sure if this helps but..

Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
May 2006 253 774 16638 47845 583.27 MB

Comments

  • HoryHory
    edited May 2006
    Well, you had 47845 hits... Divide 583MB by that and you get an average of 12KB/page (unless I'm mistaken), which is actually pretty low.
  • BergamotBergamot
    Yeah, that's not bad at all. Also, data storage and bandwidth are almost never directly related.
  • blizeHblizeH ✭✭
    Bugger, this isn't good, not good at all!

    I even resorted to disabling a load of extensions but I guess there wasn't a lot of point then?
  • BergamotBergamot
    Your host has a cap under 4gb a month?
  • blizeHblizeH ✭✭
    Well it's pre-defined by myself, I paid for what I believed to be far more than adequete for our needs, but as per usual I completely screwed up :)
  • BergamotBergamot
    Well the next step would be to install Mint or Slimstat or something and figure out where all this bandwidth is coming from.
  • lechlech ✭
    You can never predict the ebb and flow of bandwidth usage with random users if you're running anything which is used on a constant basis by the public. By the common law of averages, there's lies, damn lies, then statistics, and I want to say that for a board to push 500+mb in the course of roughly a week seems a touch excessive though. However, 4gb for a month of bandwidth as a personal setting seems reasonable if it's just vanilla without much else tied it. If you want to predict usage on a nice curve, it's probably a good idea to keep either a daily/weekly or at least a monthly tab to see what you'll want to have to upgrade to in the future.
  • blizeHblizeH ✭✭
    Many thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated, AwStats is actually installed on the server which seems pretty decent, a lot of the bandwidth is coming from an NTL IP which is odd, no one from the forum is on NTL afaik and there's no way there's anyone on the board more than I am, especially not twice as much! :O

    mini mentioned the fact that the NTL IPs will cover quite a broad area, but even so, it's kind of odd that there's no one on the board that seems to use NTL and it's racking up such a huge amount of hits and bandwidth.
  • BergamotBergamot
    You could try closing the forum to people without logins, and see if that makes a difference. Also install the ip-tracking extension.
  • corn13readcorn13read
    is it an extension you are using to see your bandwith usage?
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    No its part of the access stats on the server.
  • Mark WMark W
    edited September 2006
    I want to say that for a board to push 500+mb in the course of roughly a week seems a touch excessive

    I installed Vanilla last week and that's how much I get in a DAY. 

    Date            Hits     Page Views   Visitors  Average Visit Length   Bandwidth (KB)
    Tue 9/12/2006   13,267   7,374        115       57:19                  239,890
    Wed 9/13/2006   15,917   8,490        143       01:03:40               249,108
    Thu 9/14/2006   18,606   9,769        222       47:08                  309,752
    Fri 9/15/2006   16,140   9,347        139       01:06:50               278,839
    (There's actually only 34 registered users, but my stat software is set to identify someone as a unique user again after a certain period of time)

    If the homepage updated with AJAX they'd stop hitting fresh like monkeys on crack trying to bang out a copy of Hamlet and it would cut down on my bandwidth. The homepage is by far the largest bandwidth suck. 

      File                   Hits     Visitors    Bandwidth (KB)
    1 vanilla/               17,839   730         807,955
    2 vanilla/comments.php   16,766   680         349,300
  • KrakKrak New
    Having a homepage that automatically refreshed via AJAX would still have the same effect, wouldn't it? After all, it is still reloading stuff and hitting your server. No?
  • ithcyithcy New
    no. only the new parts would be loaded, or nothing at all if there were no updates.
  • reduxredux
    Ajax would still cause transfer of data but only a couple of kb max per refresh/query.
    Whether the page is actioned to reload or not the query's persist regularly. As is the point of ajax.

    Think gmail. The auto-save feature regularly saves, sending data back and forth, wether the data send be big or small, the regularity remains, just-in-case.

    The point is though to actively check for changes and action upon change descovery. Rather than users continually refreshing the page(s) to check for change themselves. Thus wasting bandwidth (12k per refresh(say 30 seconds) rather than ajax databse query or somthing ranging from 1-2kb every 30 seconds, or more frequently, given the b/w savings).

    Perhaps this 1 NTL user is doing no harm. Simply using your forum/site as a template, learning or copying it. Could be something quite harmless and will go away on its own when hes bored/tired/learned it all. (if he knows anything of php he'll be drooling over vanilla for the technical marvel that it is :P )
  • alnoktaalnokta
    Why not use a caching system like the system Wikipedia uses? I don't know what they are using but it seems to help them.. I mean .. can you imagine the huge amounts of hits on wiki without some sort of buffer between mysql and the users?
  • Mark WMark W
    Wikipedia is hosted by Google - nuff said. No, this is about a half dozen users refreshing like mad, myself included. Here are some of the of hits from various hosts in the past week (hits not page views): 12,672 <-- me, partly toying with the forum, partly reloading like a monkey. 7,988 5,264 3,958 2,985 2,569 2,702 2,475 2,426 I honestly expect these numbers to go up in the coming weeks (and maybe some of the higher ones to come down), the forum only got fully ramped up on Wednesday. I have ShortStat on now, so I can produce better/more reliable stats in a few days.
  • russliptonrusslipton
    Are there generally recognized formulas for Vanilla forum bandwith for a given number of users and/or a given number of discussions/comments, taking into account reasonable tradeoffs?
  • Mark WMark W
    right click -> view page info (in firefox) and multiply by hits to that page? (subtracting off-site data, such as avatars)
This discussion has been closed.