Ways to decrease bandwidth?

[Slick]

As Promised....

The original at 23453 bytes

Here's the "Diet" pill at 4112 bytes

So do the math and then decide... I could survive a little less "window dressing" if it helps keep this site up & running.

And for the guys here that don't manage bandwidth for a living or work as computer geeks, you can view the "properties" of both of these images just to verify their size and hosted locations by "right-clicking and choosing "properties" - providing you are using Internet Explorer..

 

[Luff]

I don't see any reason to support UBB's software by advertising their product on each and every page of postings. The UBB logo should go, unless the Boss is getting financial compensation for it.

My compliments, Slick, on the size reduction. I'd be willing to bet it would have gone to 60% compression and held just fine, but there's probably not much need now that it's around 4K.

If we have to have artwork in that location, I'd like to see the CPF logo there or, I'd also go for Slick's idea to use that space as an assett to generate advertising income.

I'll gladly donate some $$ if DavidW states the need. At the same time, I'd like manufacturer's other than just Arc to do their part to help out. It seems to me that if manufacturer's are getting business from this board, their access to the membership should be worth $$.

 

[Slick]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Luff:
I'd be willing to bet it would have gone to 60% compression and held just fine, <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I got curious.....

The "ultra-diet" pill at 3370 bytes

compression = 67%

I'd volunteer to compress more of the "consistently reloaded" image files here if DW feels this would benefit the goal of reducing bandwidth utilization.. If it's decided that $5 is what it'll take to fix things, then I'll antee up, but like Hotfoot said in an earlier post, there's other options available in "tuning" the default settings for folks who are browsing or lurking the BBS. It's not that I'm suggesting that the fileserver not "serve" lurkers, just smaller pieces as mentioned..

Just the tip a' the iceberg..

 

[Darell]

That has been my understanding, certainly. Otherwise the CPF might as well be hosting the pictures. BUT, it was brought up as a way to save bandwidth, it was disputed, but I have't yet seen an official ruling....

 

[Chris M.]

Regarding the "Ultamit Bulletin Board" icon, well I have one here I did around the time of my homepage design that says "CandlePower Forums" (smaller than the one on the index.htm page) it is a GIF image and substantially smaller in file size, without any of that nasty degrading that happens with JPG compression. It isn`t quite done but a few minutes tidying up will do it. I`ll post here later on and see if everyone approves, and most importantly if the Boss approves- he`s free to use it to replace the old one. I think it would be a good idea. 23+ thousand bytes is too big.....

I`ll also produce "New Topic", "Post Reply" and "Topic Closed" buttons (from the blank GIF template I created for the homepage), these will also be Gif images and very small.


I`ll get back to you!

 

[Darell]

Look at that: The home page winner who just keeps on giving!

 

[Chris M.]

Here we go then. What do you think of these? Mark, thanks for the tip aboout transparent backgrounds,the 3 "buttons" (2 buttons and one icon) have transparent b/gs but transparency doesn`t work- and is not required- for the title image so I left that opaque white.

This one currently about 9K but I think I compressed it at 7 bits per pixel (as did the buttons). Less bits per pixel, less total colours but a smaller file. I`ll experiment, see how badly they degrade at lower colour depths.

Buttons:

Any good? Boss- if you like them (and CPF members show a general positive reaction too

) they`re yours.

If the compression is hardly noticeable I`ll compress the images from the entry page too. I`m experimenting with image-maps so if I crack it, I could even re-do it with just one Gif (smaller file size than the 13 images added up that currently make up the page) and a change of code- but I would need to edit it for you if additions/changes were needed, so you may or may not like it.

As they say on Big Brother- "You Decide"

 

[The_LED_Museum]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Chris M.:
Buttons:

(...)
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I like them. Actually, so long as you keep the current "butt pills" graphics format in some capacity or otger, the BBS will look good regardless of what's done with the buttons or if they're mapped or not. Mapping *may* only affect a few really old browsers; though I never received a single complaint about it in all the time I used a map on my site's toolbox menu so it's probably a non-issue.

As long as text options are available somewhere, even people on those fancy new "web access" cellular telephones can still find their way around. :-)

 

[Slick]

Looks good ChrisM !

Now here's the "ChrisM Diet Pill"

down to 5174 from 10428 ! That's less than half the size!!

Yes it's a JPG but as long as it's not sitting on anything other that this BBS, what would it matter?

 

[Luff]

Chris - It'd be nice to have matching graphics throughout, nice offer you've made. PS. don't forget to use transparent backgrounds so we can get rid of the white box effect.

 

[Chris M.]

Thanks for trying that!

I will admit though that I don`t much care for the degradation JPEG does to sharp edged graphics- like text- when compressed. I`ll warm up Fotoshop later on and see how it compresses in the Gif format. Gif images compress by reducing the total number of displayed colours (but don`t degrade edges and lines)- from a full 16 or 32 bit colour image down to 8 or less (those are 7 bits/pixel). The gradient in the shadow does suffer somewhat but I`m sure there are ways around this- like perhaps doing away with the shadow altogether.

Again, I`ll get back to you all.

Boss- what is your opinion of these graphics?


BTW folks please try not to confuse me with "ChrisM" - who is not me (no space in name). Notice the space and the period after the M in my name. We are different people, but sharing a very similar screen name.
An easy way to tell us apart. I`m the fat Welsh one with the annoying orange banner

 

[Saaby]

Ok ok stumbeled on this and felt a little guilty, just a little, I'm new here and having a blast and posting all over the place (Nothing wrong with that) but I think I can probably cut back too, so here we go, I will get in all my Graemlins one more time now and swear to cut back

There, now, I will stop using

and start using :-p I use

so often that that should shave at least 1% off your bandwidth, maybe not that much, but it will shave some off I think

Hey, what if it's just a text signature? That doesn't add much to the bandwidth issue does it?

 

[duffahtolla]

Hi,

I currently manage approx 340 domains and am pretty familiar with web protocols. I am self taught so I might be wrong, but I think I have a solution.

I don't want to get to technical but first:

Links to images are harmless.

Emeded images that are stored at a different URL are harmless.

The CPF hosted images are MOSTLY harmless. When your browser reloads a page it checks to see if the images have changed by checking their modification date. If its unchanged the browser REUSES the one from its LOCAL cache. So their really is not much of a benefit for overcompressing the images such as the blue pill UBB thingy. All you are reducing is the initial download for a new user or someone that has cleared their cache.

The same holds true for the smileys.

These smileys were not downloaded three times. They were checked against the local cache. If found, the browser requests a modification date from the server. If they are the same the browser simply reuses the local cache. If the date is different or a local copy is not found, the server downloads ONE copy of that smiley. The rest of the matching smileys throughout the site are then LOCAL copies.

I have looked into this and think I have the culprit. I'll bet my Z3 that this may take care of ALL the CPFs bandwidth problems.

CPF is hosted on a microsoft IIS/5.0 server. This server has the capability to Compress the web pages on-the-fly before it gets sent down to the browser.

Here's my browser making a request:

GET /cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_daily HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*
Referer: http://www.candlepowerforums.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_daily
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT)
Host: www.candlepowerforums.com
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: keep-alive

The thing to notice is the line:
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
This tells the server that the client can accept the data as a compressed stream and gives it a choice of wither gzip or deflate.

Heres the servers response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 08:27:10 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Charset: ISO-8859-1
Content-Type: text/html

PLUS LOTS OF HTML

The thing to notice here is whats NOT here.

Content-Encoding: gzip

If this had been in the http header, it would have indicated that the server obeyed the compress request and that the content of the page would need to be "gunzip'ed". I would not have received 'HTML' but a stream of binary data.

This would have compressed the text content of the page by about 90%.

It's NOT being in the header tells me that the servers option to compress on the fly has NOT BEEN TURNED ON.

Please have whoever works with the CPF server read This and then check the configuration.

I'm almost certain that this is the problem.

If I'm wrong, I apologize..
If I'm right then leave my damn smileys alone!!

 

[BuddTX]

I got some of these ideas from the Dilbert comic strip, and those guys are pretty technical so, this should help.

1. Use smaller fonts!
2. Use porportionatly spaced fonts instead of monospace. They take up less room.
3. Use Grey instead of black for the color of the fonts.
4. Use semi-colons instead of colons. A semi-colon takes up HALF as much room as a colon.
5. Make the screen size of your screen smaller.
6. Connect to the internet at 1200 baud, instead of 56,000 baud.

 

[Darell]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by duffahtolla:
I'll bet my Z3 that this may take care of ALL the CPFs bandwidth problems.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
If this isn't a win-win situation for David, I don't know what is. If you're right, the CPF survives to shine for another day. If you're wrong, David drives off into the sunset with a shiny new Z3. Some guys get all the luck.

Hope you're right. That would be SLICK.

 

[DavidW]

Doesn't matter. Previous threats of switching to a Unix server will be carried out sooner or later. Then we can work from there.