I keep getting Bandwidth Exceeded errors on my newest webpage. Other than the good folks on this forum that have helped with troubleshooting and my client, we are the only ones that know about the site. So, it shouldn’t be getting a lot of traffic. There are no videos and the images are quiet small due to the fact I’m pulling them off an old webpage.
98% of the traffic is from my client’s house, but he says he’s not looking that much. We’ve used 6.45 GB of data in the last 5 days. Most of the weekend, I wasn’t even on the site at all.
My hunch is something is weird on the homepage. It’s the only page with larger images that I scanned. I’m using a ShowCase slideshow and I wonder if it’s cycling the images in a strange way that’s causing this crazy bandwidth usage.
There isn’t anything about these pages size-wise that is unusual.
There is something that you should address though - and that is the naming of your files.
01%20Homepage%20Art_thumb.png
File/folder names should stick to Alphanumerics (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) _ underscores and - hyphens. Anything else should be avoided - and that includes the space characters that you have in yours!
I am not saying that this is the cause of your problem but it is something that should be addressed as it can trip up Servers/Browsers.
Thanks for the heads up David. Dumb mistake, but I’ll get it corrected.
Any thoughts on what might be causing these insane bandwidth issues? I went over last month on usage and again this month and it was only the 5th of the month!
My ISP just keeps bumping up my limit. But soon, this website will be moved over to my client’s server where GoDaddy is the host. I’d like to solve this problem before I move the site. He’s had over 100,000 unique visitors to his site, so I expect the actual usage to go up dramatically.
If there’s not a technical problem, how can we be using over a gigabit of data a day when only a handful of people are looking at the site?
Are you doing anything to “bust” the cache system? It sounds like you may have a server issue, in that it seems to be considering repeat requests for the same image from the same computer (your client’s) to be new requests, rather than returning a header that says “nothing new here, use your cache”. That can be triggered by JavaScript or HTML code that tells the server that the request IS unique. Something as simple as a querystring: path/to/image.jpeg?123edf495 will always return a new un-cached version of the image, because the ? signals a GET request (form).
Walter
On Nov 6, 2012, at 9:46 AM, Doty wrote:
Thanks for the heads up David. Dumb mistake, but I’ll get it corrected.
Any thoughts on what might be causing these insane bandwidth issues? I went over last month on usage and again this month and it was only the 5th of the month!
My ISP just keeps bumping up my limit. But soon, this website will be moved over to my client’s server where GoDaddy is the host. I’d like to solve this problem before I move the site. He’s had over 100,000 unique visitors to his site, so I expect the actual usage to go up dramatically.
If there’s not a technical problem, how can we be using over a gigabit of data a day when only a handful of people are looking at the site?
I’ve been wondering this exact same thing. I’m not knowingly doing anything to bust the cache system. For a site like this it is important that it work well. There will be 1000s of images, but only 10-15 new ones each month.
Analytics shows almost all the traffic is on the home page, which is why I was curious about the ShowCase slideshow on that page. There are six images. But to explain this kind of usage, someone would have to literally be clicking on each of those images 8500 times. That seems impossible with less than 10 people knowing of the site’s existence. Really it’s just my client and me, plus however many people from this forum have taken a look.
The other thing I’ve wondered is if my client leaves the homepage open and it cycles those six images for hours at a time, would that be drawing extra data from the server for some reason?
Walter, I’m using all kinds of links to images (some are external links) and I don’t know if I’m doing something to tell the server these are unique requests or not. How do I find out?
Only time I’ve had unusual bandwidth issues, the server had been hacked and
used to transfer files and what-not. Only my host provider could help me
figure it out and fix it.
It could be, if the requests aren’t coded correctly in the slideshow script. Could you please try the following:
Duplicate the home page, and replace the existing slideshow with ScriptyFader, which is coded to avoid this sort of thing. Make sure that you use similar-size images, but not the same images on the two, otherwise you could end up with a confusing result.
Open up two browser windows side-by-side, one with the original home page, and one with the new one. Use Firefox Firebug in the Net tab, and see what happens. On my example page here: Jumping Fourth Graders you will see a total of 23 requests and 189.8 KB bandwidth for the entire transaction (with all caches flushed). Each repeat of an image takes no network requests and no additional bandwidth, because it is filled from the browser’s own cache.
If I’m right, then you will see a bunch of requests for images on the original home page, with each of them being returned a 200 status (content found and sent) rather than a single 200 for each unique image, and a 304 (not modified) for each following request of the same image, or a complete lack of additional requests, as in ScriptyFader.
Walter
On Nov 6, 2012, at 10:13 AM, Doty wrote:
The other thing I’ve wondered is if my client leaves the homepage open and it cycles those six images for hours at a time, would that be drawing extra data from the server for some reason?
I always try to talk my clients out of it, but when they’re prepaid it’s a tougher sell. If I run into problems I’ll suggest it again. Glad I’m not the only one that’s had trouble with GD.