Server Administrator...

[Kor]

I bet if we reduce the bandwidth a lot of these problems will just vanish.

Need those file-specific stats!!!!! Or just web server logs and I will generate the stats myself for ya.

[Khyron]

Make people host their own avatars rather than keeping them server side. That's your problem (unless a lot of people are watching the flash intro...)

Khyron

[Kor]

There is also a flash banner at the top of every forum page. I am guessing this is well over 200 kb. Also, for some reason all of the forum buttons are images (Reply, New Thread, etc). They could just as easilly be buttons or text.

[Khyron]

The buttons are fine - all are 1K or so. It's the bigger/animated avatars that get downloaded everytime some new person views the forum that gobbles the bandwidth. I don't know how flash gets cached but I'd assume it's not too bad?

For the month of June, my little Decepticon icon, which I use on most forums (beyond, theforce, etc) was downloaded 1597 times for a total of 4 megs. So my newveedub hosting for that file was probably much less.



However, my hosted "search" icon for vortex was also downloaded 1344 times. Total bandwidth consumed? 185 megs - for 1 stupid gif. And some dudes have avatars bigger than that image.

I'm guessing your problem wasn't so much the bandwidth, but how many separate session requests per user - each image, each flash etc is a separate request and web servers are assigned a max number of sessions. It's pretty easy to hit those limits when you have many small files. That's why sometimes Avatars would be red Xs - sessions were being denied during peak times. Maybe ask about what your max session count? With apache, the fields are:

MinSpareServers 8
MaxSpareServers 20
StartServers 8
MaxClients 100
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000

I have no idea what they are called in IIS.

Khyron

[Khyron]

Whups yep - it's always on but after a reboot damn thing doesnt autoconnect.

Khyron

[Kor]

I loaded about 20 pages at once and got only ONE error instead of my usual 50%

[Canadian Turbo]

I have been getting tonnes of errors today:(

[Smartiepants]

Yeah I notice no difference

[1.8Trip]

Yeah, I keep getting server timeouts. Don't know what that really means but I've been getting it on this forum since day one.

Edit: Ok, this is what I get...

Server Error
The following error occurred:
The server closed the connection while reading the response.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please contact the administrator.

[Canadian Turbo]

Not working so good today:(

[Billip]

Very very bad today. About 80% of requests fail. I'm looking for other providers right now.

[Billip]

Here's something that was recommended by some guy at RackSpace, which is pretty good. I don't know if these guys are or not. It's hosted out of Texas. All prices are in USD.

http://www.cwihosting.com/...

They have other plans as well. Seems to be the best price for what you get that I've seen so far while still seeming like a professional company.

[Canadian Turbo]

Working good now!

[1.8Trip]

Good job guys. I haven't had any problems today.:thumbsup:

[Fluidic Digital]

Right on! That's what we like to hear!! :thumbsup:

Peter