Minimizing Bandwidth Usage

[RedCloakLives!]

Hi. I thought I'd try to minimize bandwidth usage for the site.

So what's the lowest bandwidth way to check for new comics? If you post a link, I can just use that all the time.

[Trazoi]

You could sign up to the RSS feed; I don't know the bandwidth but it must be tiny.

[Zherog]

If you have to do it through the site, rather than the RSS feed, I would imagine the lowest bandwidth way would be loading a page such as a the News page and then checking the left-hand column. And, of course, if you're already spending time on the forums on a regular basis, just check the left-hand column while you're loading threads.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Link to the one of the following, which should have a minimum of images to download (which will hopefully stay in your local cache). You will always be able to get to the most recent comic from the sidebar:


Forum page (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/)
Archive Page (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html)
Comics Page (http://www.giantitp.com/Comics.html)


To further reduce bandwith if you are in the forums, since you have an account here you could turn off the display of images:

User CP -> Edit Options, then under Visible Post Elements, uncheck the following:


Show Avatars
Show Images (including attached images and images in [IMG] code)


That will drop your bandwith by a lot.

[Jimorian]

You could sign up to the RSS feed; I don't know the bandwidth but it must be tiny.

Considering that the RSS feed lists a link for EVERY comic each time it goes out... no. :smalltongue:

[NerfTW]

You're not using an appreciable amount of bandwith loading one page on the site no matter what. Unless you're hitting refresh every 5 seconds, there's no reason to look for a "low bandwith page". Just check once a day and avoid excessive reloading of the site. That's the best way to do it.

[Trazoi]

Considering that the RSS feed lists a link for EVERY comic each time it goes out... no. :smalltongue:
I've checked and technically when compressed the RSS feed is larger than the main page sans images, but it's still under 20k :smalltongue:. If you sign the RSS feed up to some external service (maybe one that sends email alerts? I'm sure one of these exists out there) then you only need to wait for it to report.

Back when I was on a heavily metered bandwidth all I did was block images from loading automatically, as well as Javascript, Flash and all that. That really cuts it down.

[Abrexa]

User CP -> Edit Options, then under Visible Post Elements, uncheck the following:


Show Avatars
Show Images (including attached images and images in [IMG] code)


That will drop your bandwith by a lot.

Only if you're trying to save your bandwidth, not the site one, I think?

At least it sounds like asking person wanted to save the GitP's.

[lesser_minion]

As far as I'm aware, the browser won't actually retrieve the RSS feed unless it's actually changed, and asking whether or not the page has changed is comparatively cheap (and, if I understand correctly, the forums -- which are the problem -- are actually on a different server to the rest of the site).

By the way, this site doesn't need any 'help' with regards to bandwidth. The problem is that the server sometimes receives more requests than it can handle, not that it doesn't have the bandwidth to handle them.

Note that switching off avatar and signature images doesn't help the site either way -- none of those images are hosted here, so virtually all of those requests will go elsewhere.

And if your data usage is metered, you wouldn't need those settings -- it's just as easy to use a compression service or just turn images off altogether.

[Zherog]

Note that switching off avatar and signature images doesn't help the site either way -- none of those images are hosted here, so virtually all of those requests will go elsewhere.

I agree with your general idea, but this statement isn't correct. The site does have local avatars - it's just the custom ones that aren't hosted here.

That said, even the local ones shouldn't affect bandwidth much, since the image will be kept in cache for the great majority of users.

[Rawhide]

If you want to know the page that has the absolute minimum impact on the server resources, that would be the forum backup redirect page (http://www.giantitp.com/forumbackup.html). It used to display only the top and side bars with a single, one line, message. Unfortunately, as it is part of the forums, it needs to include adverts or we risk violating the Project Wonderful terms of service and/or upsetting the advertisers (they would, after all, be paying for an advert that could not be seen for a few minutes if it didn't). But, that all happens off-site, so it doesn't add much in the way of resource usage to the site and is still the least resource intensive page with the up to date comic list published on the sidebar.

[Phishfood]

The RSS feed only updates at certain times and contains no images. Unlike loading the page, you can configre RSS to only check once a day which I think has been done.

So definately RSS is the way to go.

[LordZarth]

The RSS feed only updates at certain times and contains no images. Unlike loading the page, you can configre RSS to only check once a day which I think has been done.

So definately RSS is the way to go.

I'm sorry, ma'am, you've just been Rawhided.