Reducing Bandwidth

A

AbbieRose

New member
If you know for sure that you are going a little heavy on the bandwidth for your site, how can you reduce it? Other than completely getting rid of images, videos and the likes-is there anything that you can use to compress the files that you are using, or even maybe multicast a video instead of sending out multiple unicast copies?
 
You could

I wouldn't recommend taking away any features if you're getting a lot of traffic because of them. It's not worth the cost savings if your site becomes a lot less "sticky". You can compare the various features page by page to see if there are certain things that aren't getting much traffic and take those away. Just be careful that you don't short change your visitors who are expecting things to be there when they come back.
 
Thats why I asked if I could compress the files or multicast, instead of taking them away. I have no intentions of taking valuable features away, but if I could reduce via a compression technique, or multicast all my videos then this would be beneficial.
 
Quickest and easiest way is to enable mod_gzip (although this requires your hosting to be using Apache 2), this compresses all the content on the server before sending it over the Internet.

This gives massive bandwidth savings, we've found it to be really useful for some of our clients with high traffic (particularly forums).
 
Sometimes we have clients that will randomly need a little extra getting close to the end of their billing month and we have no issues bumping up the BW for a few days, most clients are happy with that but not every place would do it either. They know if they want to bump up to the next package they will do so at their own request, most times though people are happy with a free bump to see if it happens again they will happily swap over packages.
 
shockym said:
Sometimes we have clients that will randomly need a little extra getting close to the end of their billing month and we have no issues bumping up the BW for a few days, most clients are happy with that but not every place would do it either. They know if they want to bump up to the next package they will do so at their own request, most times though people are happy with a free bump to see if it happens again they will happily swap over packages.
Click to expand...

Yea, we also do this. Hard usage caps are really annoying!
 
networkeq said:
Quickest and easiest way is to enable mod_gzip (although this requires your hosting to be using Apache 2), this compresses all the content on the server before sending it over the Internet.

This gives massive bandwidth savings, we've found it to be really useful for some of our clients with high traffic (particularly forums).
Click to expand...


Couple of questions, since I haven't enable mod_gzip yet.
Does it add to processor demand? And does it compress all downloaded files or just html files?
 
Yes it does have a processing overhead but we haven't noticed any effects really. However, we're running on 2 x quad core Xeon processors so there's lots of power available.

You can set which kind of files it compresses (obviously it's pointless compressing images but HTML and script compress well)
 
Like any compression based thing, it can increase and possibly decrease at the same time, the pressure put on the CPU. Apparently you can choose the file types that you want compressed. http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/articles/howto/mod_gzip_1.html

It would probably make little sense to add already compressed file types (most images and videos). You're better off re-compressing them with a better specialized algorithm (codec), if any are available, or reduce their quality.

Instead of streaming only, it may make sense to let users download the video file. They will then be able to replay it at any time, without using up bandwidth unnecessarily.
 
As I understood it, downloading generally does increase bandwidth useage compared to streaming, but I'm not sure why. I only heard this as a reason that a particular site didn't allow downloads.

Thanks, it seems gzip might be the answer to the problems.
 
If your wanting to save on the bandwidth, you might want to look into the free services companies offer.

Such as: imageshack, just link your photos on your site from that site. The average end user would be none the wiser.
 
Indeed it should be mod_deflate/mod_gzip which should be an answer for this issue, the bandwidth is considerably reduced on using the said modules.
 
networkeq said:
Quickest and easiest way is to enable mod_gzip (although this requires your hosting to be using Apache 2), this compresses all the content on the server before sending it over the Internet.

This gives massive bandwidth savings, we've found it to be really useful for some of our clients with high traffic (particularly forums).
Click to expand...

Generally you will see 50~85% bandwidth savings on html/css/js/xml when sing mod_deflate/mod_gzip.

Blue said:
Couple of questions, since I haven't enable mod_gzip yet.
Does it add to processor demand? And does it compress all downloaded files or just html files?
Click to expand...
It does add to processor demand slightly but generally you only want to enable it to compress html/xml/css/js which are text files that compress very very quickly with minimal CPU time usage. It may add say 5ms to serving the page but the transfer happens say 45ms faster so your end user ends up ahead.

Also the end user's browser has to request gzip'd content so if they are using an older browser Apache will still serve up the uncompressed content.

hzSari said:
Indeed it should be mod_deflate/mod_gzip which should be an answer for this issue, the bandwidth is considerably reduced on using the said modules.
Click to expand...
This is true.
 
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try compressing your files,that help greatly.
also try to refurbish your scripting code,this is generally the most helpful.
 
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