[thelist] Re: Stats/hosting problem

[josh]

Well, if your guess is correct that 70% of it is coming from the large files 
then if you manually manipulate the BBS software to only show 100 headers 
you should be able to get the site under the 3 meg mark. 

If you have a 56K connection, see how long it takes for the page to download 
and try to figure out a rough estimate of the size.  I find it hard to 
believe that people would wait for a one meg page to load though... 

Good luck!
Josh 


> 
> 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 
> 
> 
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