The bandwidth Issue and an Idea

from WinCustomize Forums
I've been thinking about the bandwidth issue on this site for some time. This site is slow, but that is understandable considering the resources it has to work with. I understand the idea behind selling items such as t-shirts and the like to generate more income to provide for bandwidth. However it seems there are so many users that it couldn't possibly keep pace.
Where will the bandwidth come from? Why not let it come from the users themselves! What I am talking about is using a P2P network such as Gnutella and let us downlaod from each other. If I can download every imagineable Britney Spears song or picture why not a skin or theme. Most of the current programs such a Limewire, Bearshare, and Gnotella allow you to specify extensions to look for and IP address's to search.
How could it work? WC could set up a host we could use to login to and get started. WC would still receive uploads but just maintain a "Best of Library" and new submissions. Once they've been on the site for a few days and have been downloaded by a good number of users the download link would be removed leaving only the preview. You would then need to search for the title over the network.
I know not everyone has a high speed connection, but I think enough probably do to make it possible. Most of the file sizes are condsiderably smaller than a music file. I'm not an expert in this area by any means but it just sounded like a good enough idea to post. Let me know what you think... Bill
4,908 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Someone put forward a very similar idea a while back, but the problem is that it's just not practical. Aside from the sheer amount of coding involved in developing a peer to peer file sharing application, having the downloads centralized allows things such as increased reliability and the ability to easily keep statistics. The only real viable alternative is to have mirrors of the site, and direct downloads to a script that chooses the mirror with the most available bandwidth. Unfortunately, not many users here are in a position to donate web servers to the cause, and those that did would face the problem of astronomical bandwidth bills. With the way things are at the moment, advertising revenue doesn't cover the bandwidth bills for ad funded sites, and as such, I believe it's only a matter or time until bandwidth costs fall accordingly.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
One idea floating around the office is to have premium members. WC is approaching 700,000 unique visitors per month (while T-shirt sales are <100 per month).

Traffic isn't universally high though. It's really just 11am to 5pm EST that the website is really busy, the rest of the time it's pretty reasonable (other than around 4am EST when something keeps crashing for an hour or two for reasons we don't know yet).

So basically, users who had downloaded over 50 megabytes of skins and weren't apprentices or higher in access and hadn't purchased anything would not be able to download in those high traffic times.

This would ensure that the site was reasonably fast for new users or casual users and encourage the mega users to help foot the ever increasing bill of this website. With a recession looming, I can tell you that it won't be too long before measures will have to be taken to decrease bandwidth use or pay for it (by December for certain).

That's just one of the ideas floating around though.
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
the reason a recession will come is becasue people predict a recession, its all about confidence, all it takes is one person to say theres gonna be a recession, confidence falls, spending decreases, saving increases, which causes the downfall of the economy, talking about shooting urself in the foot, all i say is spend spend spend!
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Last week, over 200,000 people were laid off from the airline industry alone.

But I'm glad you feel that way Berzerka, have you bought your cap and t-shirt and CD yet?
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
another method of reducing bandwidth might be to reduce the number of designs for the site. Once you've loaded a theme the graphics are cached, if people are constantly swapping and changing then this might reduce the bandwidth load by a small amount.

Im sure you've optimised the code quite a bit, but optimising the HTML fragments will greatly reduce usage... especially when u have so many visitors. for example, if you had:






you could condense it to

Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I think someone should take a VERY close look at the HTML this site sends out.

Just visiting 2 skin sections and looking at the first page only and then visiting the message board resulted in over 200k being downloaded.

This is with pictures disabled so that did not have impact the results.

In fact in the last 5 mins I have had 0.5 MB of traffic from this site (all HTML - no pictures), yet I have not actually downloaded any skins. All I did was look at the first page of 2 skin sections, visit the message board, login, visit the message board again and viewed this post.

Even the main page is over 70k of HTML and I can only imagine how many times that gets visited each day.

Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Listen to 'citizen' Neil...
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top
We have looked at it and been looking at it for months. We have reduced the size by a great deal.

Most of the size in HTML is due to the abundance of tables. Tables can give a nice visual effect and are smaller than using graphics.

But where does the bandwidth go? Downloading of skins. We've mapped out where the bandwidth goes over the past couple of months.

If we want to reduce bandwidth useage, we'll have to reduce people downloading skins.

I would highly suggest that someone visit DeviantArt.com and check out a random section there and see how many downloads the most popular downloads of the day are getting there and then compare to here. And remember, DA, like us, has bandwidth problems, so you can imagine how much bandwidth we're using.

The time will probably come where high bandwidth sections are limited in some ways where those who support this site get unlimited access and those that don't get limited access. I can't think of any other way.
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I checked out DA this morning, hadn't been there in a while. They are definitely on the slow side. It seems however they are giving a P2P client, Red Swoosh, a try. It should be interesting to see how that works out. I couldn't find a whole lot of details on exactly how it functions, but it seems to initiate file sharing between users if there is a badwidth advantage...