[thelist] Stats/hosting problem

kris burford [midtempo] kris at midtempo.net
Tue Jan 8 11:51:30 CST 2002


hi all,

i'm in the process of restructuring/redesigning a largish traffic
"lifestyle" site in the uk that is currently using 9 Gig / month in
bandwidth. i'm moving them into a database driven format, utilising php and
mysql. their current host (demon internet - uk) is one that currently won't
provide database access in their existing config and the reseller account i
usually employ (which does) has a max bandwidth allocation of 3gig/month
before they start to impose charges.

from the minimal stats i can get from their log files, currently some 80% of
the total number of bytes transferred is from their forum (webBBS 4.33.).

they're doing 680k page impressions a month (which if my calculator works
properly, averages at 13k/page - not unreasonable, in fact pretty damn
good...).

BUT 70% of their total bandwidth comes from file sizes from 1-10mb, some
5,000 requests (calculator again: averaging 1.25 meg/file). the only reason
i can find for this is that at the moment the default setting for the
message board is to show the last three months headers, currently some
16,000 messages. [i've tried to save the html file to my machine in order to
identify the total file size of the default list, to no avail (no idea why,
have used explorer, navigator and opera...), but even now i still can't
believe that a list of this size would amount to over a meg...].

i've been through the file type report and perl scripts amount for 80% of
the traffic, so it must be the forum which is causing this...

anyway, my issue is this: how do i calculate their bandwidth requirements?
it seems to me that the forum is skewing all the stats so much that i can't
see the wood for the trees. whilst the client is well known, they've not a
lot of money and i'd hate to recommend that they get something which proved
to be either too much or too little.

oh, the other considerations is that i'm also moving them out of a rather
complex frameset (with flash navigation) to an html/css structure, which
probably means more requests to the server as each page reloads anew - and
then there's the load that the database interaction will add...

help...

kris

--

kris burford
midtempo ltd
web strategy, design, build and hosting
www.midtempo.net





More information about the thelist mailing list