Blink, Blink…”Whoops”
Posted on Tuesday the 5th of February, 2008 at 12:44 pm in AsidesTake a look at the following stats and let me know if you see anything odd.
| Summary by Month | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Monthly Totals | KBytes | Visits | Pages | Files | Hits | ||||
| Feb 2008 | 3769739 | 8427 | 24576 | 121569 | 132159 | |||||
| Jan 2008 | 3634098 | 36357 | 131454 | 429936 | 478043 | |||||
Didn’t notice anything odd? Take a look at the first 4 days of the month below (focus on the bold column.)
| Daily Statistics for February 2008 | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day | Hits | Files | Pages | Visits | KBytes | |||||||
| 1 | 12484 | 11167 | 3915 | 1194 | 100.954 | |||||||
| 2 | 14990 | 13412 | 5617 | 1273 | 136.491 | |||||||
| 3 | 41622 | 37873 | 7236 | 2417 | 1.288.875 | |||||||
| 4 | 62827 | 58979 | 7763 | 3544 | 2.242.575 | |||||||
If you noticed, Yah, seriously, but if you didn’t: in two days I used as much bandwidth as the previous months. It turns out that on the SoBe Lizard post I added 5 PNG screenshots to the post. Then I went back to the Super Bowl party. Well, Google found it very quickly, a lot of people searched for it, and the post ranked very high, so that one post got the Google version of the slash-dot effect.
Turns out that each one of those 5 images were about 200KB. It wouldn’t have been a big deal on a normal post, but it meant that each visitor downloaded about a Megabyte of images every page load. (In comparison, the CSS, JavaScript and the HTML files adds up to about 31KB.)
Like I said: blink, blink…woops.
Update: I contacted my host, and asked to buy more bandwidth, and they were kind enough to grant me an extra 3 GB of bandwidth for free. I love this company: I’ve never had an issue with them (unlike most of my previous hosts.)
One must be very careful about the post content, because of the impact it could have on server and bandwidth load.
In Truden Web Site I had about 50 GB difference on a month, coming from a single *.mp3 file.
See August in the image bellow:
Reply to ND SIsoevWell, I see that no image post is allowed in the comments.
Reply to ND SisoevHere is the image: IMAGE
That really hurts. It would have killed my website because I only buy 5GB a month, and I rarely use it all (all the AJAX helps keep costs down.)
Reply to AaronIn that regard what is best, to have AJAXed WP or to use wp-cache plugin
Reply to ND SisoevBoth help conserve resources, but they conserve different ones.
AJAXed WordPress mainly saves bandwidth because it only sends small amounts of data, but wp-cache sends the entire file every time, so it uses the same amount of bandwidth.
WP-Cache, however, saves the file, so the server doesn’t have to reprocess everything with every page load, so it saves CPU time. AJAXed WordPress would save some CPU processing time, because it only needs to load part of the page, but not as much as WP-Cache.
Reply to AaronSo, one better have installed both AJAXed WordPress and WP-cache
Reply to ND SisoevI’ve never used WP-cache at the same time as aWP, so I don’t know if they work together, but if they do, you would get the double benefit because only people who want to read full posts will see them, so you save bandwidth without having to have aWP process every post every time it is loaded.
Reply to AaronI’ll try it this weekend and I’ll tell you how it works
Reply to ND Sisoev