BT bandwidth?

[Anonymous User]

I'm sorry, all I see is a big donation drive there, however, if that is what you mean by the family pulling together to help out, then it would seem the bandwidth shut down certainly led to a fundraiser.

Planned or not, the results are the same, as predicted.

Let me clarify, so as not to fuel the innuendos already happening there, (where no response can be given) by the usual suspects who are trying desperately once again to shift the focus from the topic.

There is no reason what so ever that a forum should shut down the last day or two of every month. I speak from my own experience with forums, namely AoB and KoB. If our limit is reached, we simply get billed more, but we have assured this will not happen by simply getting a plan that is beyond our current usage. We get over a million hits a month on each site, we host full sized, high quality pictures, we have no size limits, and we exist on donations only, without ads, banners, fund raisers, begging, etc.

The fact is that since is is amazingly simple to assure any site does not shut down because of limts, so there must be a reason why it is allowed to do so month after month. The most obvious answer is to raise funds, a theory that is supported once again by the moderators fueling a donation drive.

Also, for the record, I was a four medal contributor when I was banned from BT some three years ago.


Will

 

[subnet_rx]

Well, the mods obviously moved the post to a private forum or deleted it. Maybe they will take some hints from the posts that I and others posted though trying to help them conserve bandwidth.

 

[meushi]

It's a shame, there were some funny comments in the thread... like how hotlinking pictures from a free picture host was the cause of the bandwidth usage on BT.

I'm pretty sure that the html size for the average page can be halved if they follow the hints I gave... I was able to shave 25% of the size in a few minutes without any noticeable impact on the design.

 

[Smoke]

We get over a million hits a month on each site, we host full sized, high quality pictures, we have no size limits, and we exist on donations only, without ads, banners, fund raisers, begging, etc.


Will

I have no idea about how internet sites work, or how many guests look at a site, or if guests are even registered as "hits". I would be interested in this one million+ a month number you threw out there for us to digest.

That would mean that 33,333.3 people would have to hit that site per day. If we just use the members, thats 508. That would mean that every member would have to hit the site every day all month long 65.61 times per day.

The most users ever there at AoB was like a 116 back in April.

How is this number derived?
Is there anyone else that can back this up?

If this is true, (highly doubtful) comparetively speaking, BT must get 10 million hits per month.

One last question, I have no idea how hits relates to bandwidth useage? Can I be enlightened?

Al

 

[subnet_rx]

Hits is a statistic given to non-techies to wow them about your web site. What people don't know is, you loading one page could generate 100 hits. So, 1,000,000 hits could just mean 10,000 pages viewed. Hits has little to no use when related to bandwidth usage since it's very hard to specify how much each hit is costing in bandwidth terms.

 

[subnet_rx]

It's a shame, there were some funny comments in the thread... like how hotlinking pictures from a free picture host was the cause of the bandwidth usage on BT.

I'm pretty sure that the html size for the average page can be halved if they follow the hints I gave... I was able to shave 25% of the size in a few minutes without any noticeable impact on the design.

My last 3 paragraph comment before it was deleted tried to explain how ridiculous it was to tell your members that they should not embed pictures so that your site can conserve bandwidth. It shows a lack of intelligence for the way the internet works. It's sad, but you really can't expect much when a bonsai person starts dabbling into forums. You get about the same thing that you would get if a bonsai beginner that has read several books tries to convert nursery stock. It's a good start, but the seasoned professionals see a tree that looks amateurish and needs years of work.

 

[PaulStokes]

With experience being a server admin for 2 popular bonsai forums, I can tell you that BT is just trying to save a bit of money by having very very low bandwidth cutoffs.

The KoB and AoB have more than 300x the amount of bandwidth that they use.

 

[Smoke]

With experience being a server admin for 2 popular bonsai forums, I can tell you that BT is just trying to save a bit of money by having very very low bandwidth cutoffs.

The KoB and AoB have more than 300x the amount of bandwidth that they use.

Give us the skinny Paul, just how does a site get a million hits a month?

....or does it?

 

[Bonsai Nut]

Give us the skinny Paul, just how does a site get a million hits a month?

....or does it?

Hits are different from page views which are different from visits. Hits are counted each time a server sends a file to your browser, so a single web page can generate many hits, and a single visit (consisting of many page views) can generate 100's of hits. A million hits a month is actually very achievable - we get over a million hits per month even here on little ole' www.bonsainut.com

If you are an advertiser, you are most interested in unique visitors (which is a measure of the audience of the site). If you are the site host, you are most interested in bandwidth used (as well as a few other server-side operations that can bring servers down to their knees - like forum search functionality, etc). Last month we used almost 10 million KBytes of bandwidth. Sounds like a lot, but really it is just a drop in the Internet bucket. Bandwidth costs have fallen so much that you can get almost unlimited bandwidth for a very reasonable amount.

 

[Vance Wood]

Last month we used almost 10 million KBytes of bandwidth. Sounds like a lot, but really it is just a drop in the Internet bucket. Bandwidth costs have fallen so much that you can get almost unlimited bandwidth for a very reasonable amount.

Ahh-Hah--The plot thickens.

 

[Smoke]

So what(on average) does a million hits a month actually mean? Does this translate to something like maybe 10,000 actual hits. Meaning actual people actually visiting the site? If Nut and AoB are getting a million a month, I really wonder what BT really gets with its fully functioning archive of text and photo's going back nearly 8 years now. That is a lot of archive to peruse through and probably some of the most entertaining reading on the net.

...or is this so misleading that an actual REAL number cannot be ascertained from this useless information in this discussion since it has no relevance to bandwidth useage anyway?

IBC recently just had a huge donation campaign to raise funds for what was nearly a down and out forum. Even used the ever popular thermometer and everything.

I have recieved emails (that was plural) from AoB and KoB asking for donations in the past so I think in all fairness all the forums must occasionaly ask for funds to achieve certain goals. If BT wishes to keep its bandwidth at a certain level who are we to question it. It's frankly none of my business.

Al

 

[anttal63]

tell m how it is al. too much time on their hands. work those trees fella's they probably need it.

 

[Chris Johnston]

One day at the dealership a few years ago, one of Those Guys came in. Some of you know what I mean, Those Guys who insist they are best buds with the dealer principal but maybe get the name almost right. As we sat in the car he wanted to purchase, he began asking me to do an "in and out" on his trade in. For those not in the automobile business, that means he had a friend who wanted to buy his car for more than we would probably put into it, but he wanted to take advantage of the sales tax exemption by "trading in" his car. See, in Kansas, if you trade your car at the dealership, you pay sales tax on the difference, but if you sell it outright, you pay on the purchase price.

So what he was asking was to circumvent the law and screw the state out of some of their legal sales tax dollars. Now our dealership has been 75 years on the same corner under the same family ownership, and we just don't skirt those laws. Would we have gotten away with it? Probably. Was it the ethical thing to do? Absolutely not.

So what happens? This guy actually called us unethical because we wouldn't help him. What a nerve!

My point is, it's often those with their own misbegotten motives who look for the dastardly in others who have given no previous indication that they were slimy.

 

[meushi]

Chris,

Inter-forum drama aside, as I am not interested in the waste of time known as forum politics...

To keep with your car analogy:

if the fuel tank of your car looks like a colander, do you pass the hat around to collect money so you can pour more fuel in or do you get it towed to the mechanic to get the tank changed?

The technical solution I proposed in the thread before it vanished is the exact technique that saved 2TB/day on ESPN website. By spending 15 minutes on it, I removed 25KB of dead weight from the web page without impacting the design or the function of the page. I'm pretty sure one can clean up to 50KB of the current page size by redesigning the template and bringing it up to state of the art standard and look. Not only would it save on the bandwidth costs but it would also load and render faster, so everybody wins.

In the 25KB I removed, there was:

• 10KB of pure cruft that shouldn't be in the template of a site that has been running for so many years: makers indicating in which part of the template one was, blocks of code commented out in 2004(!) but still served at every page request, ... You normally put that kind of cruft in place when you first try the product and try to get a hang of how everything goes together. You normally remove the cruft as soon as you are sure it works as you would otherwise be wasting a lot of bandwidth.
• 7.5KB of CSS which should be split in its own file so the browsers can cache it, therefore saving more bandwidth.
• the rest was javascript that should also be split off for caching like the CSS

Multiply those 25KB by the amount of pages served in a month and you start seeing that cleaning this would avoid the bandwidth issues BT has been experiencing "lately".

As I explained to one of the mods last night, I would gladly have pursued the optimization experiment directly on a vBulletin installation but there's no way I'm forking $100 to be able to do what should be the administration team's job. I'd rather spend that money buying trees or going to a workshop as things stand right now.

Michael

 

[Chris Johnston]

Michael,
The correct answer is what I mentioned in that thread. People go through life changes, and my guess is that Matt is unable or unwilling to go through the effort at this time to update the site. He didn't ask for more donations. Give the guy a break.

 

[Graydon]

Chris,

Inter-forum drama aside, as I am not interested in the waste of time known as forum politics...

To keep with your car analogy:

if the fuel tank of your car looks like a colander, do you pass the hat around to collect money so you can pour more fuel in or do you get it towed to the mechanic to get the tank changed?

The technical solution I proposed in the thread before it vanished is the exact technique that saved 2TB/day on ESPN website. By spending 15 minutes on it, I removed 25KB of dead weight from the web page without impacting the design or the function of the page. I'm pretty sure one can clean up to 50KB of the current page size by redesigning the template and bringing it up to state of the art standard and look. Not only would it save on the bandwidth costs but it would also load and render faster, so everybody wins.

In the 25KB I removed, there was:

• 10KB of pure cruft that shouldn't be in the template of a site that has been running for so many years: makers indicating in which part of the template one was, blocks of code commented out in 2004(!) but still served at every page request, ... You normally put that kind of cruft in place when you first try the product and try to get a hang of how everything goes together. You normally remove the cruft as soon as you are sure it works as you would otherwise be wasting a lot of bandwidth.
• 7.5KB of CSS which should be split in its own file so the browsers can cache it, therefore saving more bandwidth.
• the rest was javascript that should also be split off for caching like the CSS

Multiply those 25KB by the amount of pages served in a month and you start seeing that cleaning this would avoid the bandwidth issues BT has been experiencing "lately".

As I explained to one of the mods last night, I would gladly have pursued the optimization experiment directly on a vBulletin installation but there's no way I'm forking $100 to be able to do what should be the administration team's job. I'd rather spend that money buying trees or going to a workshop as things stand right now.

Michael

That loud *BANG* you just heard was my head exploding after reading your post. I'm so glad there are people like you that can not only understand this but can do this. And by the way what is cruft?

 

[meushi]

Chris,

We had that kind of situation on one of the forums I moderate... the owner/admin of the site lost his job and had to seriously reevaluate his life (read: sell all his stuff to put food on the table). He took a few minutes to promote a few moderators to admin status so that business could go on as usual while he was not available. Luckily he did that, because what was foreseen as a few weeks off turned into a ~2 years hiatus. It was a shock to everybody when he came back, as we all thought he was dead after such a long time without news.

The $100 snap was not directed at Matt or at the donation drive but at vBulletin... I want to give my free time to help BT by optimizing the template or even by designing a few new ones but there's no way I'm paying vBulletin $100 for the privilege of doing so for about a year or $180 to be able to do it every time the need arises (as long as BT doesn't upgrade to a newer release of vBulletin). Why people insist on paying for a forum platform when there are so many good open source ones available is a bit beyond me, but that's another debate

Hoping it cleared my position a bit,
Michael

 

[subnet_rx]

Yes, I was just about to post that this really has nothing to do with a person. He can appoint other people to do this work that want to volunteer to help the forum. Some of these decisions, like telling everyone to upload their pictures instead of embedding them, is a conscious decision by someone that does have time for it. I look at a donation in cases like this as a payment for providing me with a service and an investment into the future of the community. With these types of indicators though, who would invest in that business?

 

[meushi]

That loud *BANG* you just heard was my head exploding after reading your post. I'm so glad there are people like you that can not only understand this but can do this. And by the way what is cruft?

Graydon,

I always forget that "cruft" isn't standard English but an uncommon computer term

You can think of cruft as "fluff" or "dust bunnies" hiding behind furniture. Hmm, actually "clutter" would also be a good definition.

The "pure" part is actually an economic term... "pure value added" is when you increase the price of a good or service without actually doing anything on/to it between buying and selling.

In this context, "pure cruft" was meant as "useless clutter".

Michael, mixing technical lingo for fun and profit

 

[anttal63]

this is how i see it;
do i get immense enjoyment from bt? yes.
have i come away with lots of knowledge from bt this past year? yes.
do i want to continue to be part of bt? yes.

so on my behalf i will offer a donation to say thanks. how updated the software is has no bearing on any of this. it hasnt stopped me from enjoying and learning. it was suggested by member's that some donations be kicked in if people felt this way about bt. nobody was forced to do anything they dont want to do. at the end of the day if we show some good will and appreciation, that might help matt to find whatever he is lacking in at the moment.

finally either people do or dont donate but by the same token be possative about the great attributes, not negative about trivia.