Limit on smilies? Anyone else, have I missed something?

[jfulcer]

Originally posted by jipsy
It's also stored on MY website, meaning that it pulls NO bandwidth from disboards, therefore costing Pete nothing.

If people want to post 400 pictures in a post, as long as they are stored somewhere besides disboards, it shouldn't matter. It's when you store your pics on Pete's site that it costs him big bucks.

But that's what Pete is trying to get across. That post that has a ton of pictures on it (or even smilies at another location) will take people with dialup a good deal of time to load -holding up the DISboards server. I would venture to guess at least half of the Disney geeks here have dialup. So for every post they look at, every page - they have a connection open. Multiply that times 800-900 (which during busy times is a good average of people on) and you've got a server that's got lots of connections open trying to send those posts. Some of them for a long time, some of them short. A server with a ton of connections open is just as slow as a server that doesn't have the bandwidth to serve all the requests.

If a lot of those users would get broadband, it would be a different story. The same post it takes a dialup 30 seconds to load takes me 2 seconds, if not quicker. But thats not realistic.

I don't know what the solution is. Right now, it's Pete taking away our large number of picture posts...

 

[KathyTX]

jipsy,

Although your second image is stored somewhere besides the DIS, it still uses resources here as well as at the server where it's stored.

Processes, threads, etc. ALL have some impact on web server performance. Perhaps over simplifying the issue by using the term "bandwidth" was misleading... Simplifying your images will help, but every object on a page has some sort of performance cost at the web server, as well as at the client.

Depending on how the web server is configured, you may encounter your performance bottlenecks in different ways. Your connection may not be big enough/fast enough for all of the requests in and out, and bandwidth becomes your primary concern. You may find that you've got tons of concurrent users and complex requests (possibly containing many image objects), and then processing capacity and memory become your primary concerns. A web server administrator juggles these issues and tries to find the best way to tune a given web server to provide the best overall performance.

The only time the bandwidth and processor issues aren't concerns would be when you have a server that's significantly overpowered for its load. That's obviously not the case here.

There's a lot more to running and tuning a web server than simple bandwidth related to image size.

The DIS is a very busy site with a huge load. Pete's requests are not unreasonable, and I think we should support whatever procedures and restrictions he decides to implement in and attempt to make the DIS run better.

I enjoy the DIS. I'm very glad Pete has provided it for us to use. He has the right to make the rules, and we have the right to abide by them or go play somewhere else.

 

[Toby'sFriend]

I wish I could put a whole long line of laughing smilies here.

Well you can very well display that sentiment with only one smilie Jeff! Here - let me help you:

 

[jfulcer]

Originally posted by Rajah
It'd make more sense to have a function that sums up the total bytes each image uses and if it's over, oh, 150k total per the post, require them to remove something or optimize. *That* would make a real impact on the board speed.

Bummer is, then you're using the bandwidth to figure out the size of those pictures, etc... It's a catch-22. And that's also assuming they could add that in. It's too bad we couldn't make those suggestions.

And *most* of the time, people aren't downloading the smiles over and over again like you said, but it's possible some browsers could be set to load everything every time and they don't know it.

 

[jfulcer]

Originally posted by Toby'sFriend
Well you can very well display that sentiment with only one smilie Jeff! Here - let me help you:

Gee, thanks.