The Bandwidth usage of CAA Discussion

[LorentzForce]

I don't know where this will belong, so I'll just put it here. Sounds more right than the Comments section, and afterall this is all about computers in the end.

Anyway, I have read the news that says CAA is using more bandwidth than ever, due to high number of visitors now. I don't know the exact statistics of visitors and number of hits, but one thing for sure it probably is draining the bandwidth-blood of CAA, or so to speak.

The point of this thread is to think of ways to reduce bandwidth usage, or to overcome this problem. Prayer will always be there, but to make miracles happens people has to do something, not sit around.

How about forcing everyone to use the 'lite' skin? It may help reduce bandwidth for a while, until the limit is reached again, so it is a temporary aid. Or should there be some other forms of donations and such for CAA.

Well... got any ideas?

(this thread is here because I'd HATE to see CAA going down at end of every months)

[shooraijin]

Actually, I just opened a thread on this in the mod section (which we'll be chatting about), but I'm sure other suggestions would be welcome. Most of the ones I'm looking at involve unnecessary bulk in pages (every page seems to have a CSS embedded in it, which could be farmed off into a separate page), and the skins could be made less weighty. There were a few other things as well.

[LorentzForce]

Heh, it's not like I'm a mod and can tell that there's another thread in the mods only section

But in the end, no matter how much anyone can 'shave off' the site and optimise it for minimum bandwidth usage it'll still eventually hit the end. Of course if it's possible to decrease its usage to like 50% from now just by changing templates it'll help greatly; it'll give time for perhaps new and bigger server.

[Straylight]

We've had quite a few ideas.. unfortunately the lite skin idea is rather a pain to implement because of the way vbulletin works. (stupid vB). I've already optimised the avatars (moved to filesystem in order to aid client side caching efficiency), and disabled attachment thumbnails.

The ultimate solution is of course an upgrade to the service plan, which is what i'm doing next month. As far as root servers go, we're considering it, but are unlikely to make a switch yet.

[madphilb]

I'd hate to say it, but wouldn't it help also if the attachments where removed from the system? It would be a bummer for everyone to have to host any pics they wanted on there (and they would eventually disapear from the messages), but it might help (even if it's a temporary thing).

Is there an ability to keep the files intact and turn off the option when we reach a percentage of the bandwidth used up?

[Fsiphskilm]

So noz why don't you