Saving Mises.org some bandwidth

On the TO DO LIST wiki, I saw that a goal was to shrink bandwidth usage by 2TB a month.

Since I don't know what the total bandwidth usage is, I don't know how useful this suggestion will be, but a VIEW SOURCE of the Mises.org home page, shows that 11% of the page code, is devoted to this one value

<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value= LOADS OF DATA HERE

I don't know anything about asp or .Net but this value eats up a TON of bandwidth.  Whatever is in there (looks like some sort of hash), it's huge.

One more suggestion/idea.  I know Amazon sells data storage and delivery (similar to a poor man's CDN).  I don't know what your current bandwidth costs are, but perhaps taking some of the larger sized and most frequently accessed media items to such a framework, might save some money, because in my experience, purchasing bandwidth up and above what is included with a hosting plan, is usually quite expensive.

And lastly, the "LITERATURE BOX" module on the main site, has pdf icons commented out on each entry.  That is also HTML overhead.

 

Bandwidth is cheap and keep getting cheaper. I don't see why are you worried.

kiba:

Bandwidth is cheap and keep getting cheaper. I don't see why are you worried.

I was responding to the TO DO wiki started by HeroicLife.  Apparently it is a goal of LvMI to cut bandwidth by 2TB a month by seeking out areas of efficiency to exploit, and thus my thread...

 

liberty student:

kiba:

Bandwidth is cheap and keep getting cheaper. I don't see why are you worried.

I was responding to the TO DO wiki started by HeroicLife.  Apparently it is a goal of LvMI to cut bandwidth by 2TB a month by seeking out areas of efficiency to exploit, and thus my thread...

 

Constantly looking for efficiency is never a bad thing, especially with a large project such as the Mises site. 

I might look around at the site & see if there is any unnecessary CSS action going on, as I've been doing that a lot lately with my own stuff. 

I saw on the idea of a bittorrent server on the Brainstorming wiki page, which could potentially save large amounts of bandwidth from people downloading large files (video, audio, pdfs, etc).  I'm assuming these large files are served through the same connection and/or hosting account as the rest of the website.

liberty student:

On the TO DO LIST wiki, I saw that a goal was to shrink bandwidth usage by 2TB a month.

Since I don't know what the total bandwidth usage is, I don't know how useful this suggestion will be, but a VIEW SOURCE of the Mises.org home page, shows that 11% of the page code, is devoted to this one value

<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value= LOADS OF DATA HERE

I don't know anything about asp or .Net but this value eats up a TON of bandwidth.  Whatever is in there (looks like some sort of hash), it's huge.

One more suggestion/idea.  I know Amazon sells data storage and delivery (similar to a poor man's CDN).  I don't know what your current bandwidth costs are, but perhaps taking some of the larger sized and most frequently accessed media items to such a framework, might save some money, because in my experience, purchasing bandwidth up and above what is included with a hosting plan, is usually quite expensive.

And lastly, the "LITERATURE BOX" module on the main site, has pdf icons commented out on each entry.  That is also HTML overhead.

 

All together the CSS files are around 70kb (on disk); perhaps one file could be used to refer to the CSS files instead of individually loading them  (70kb just seems too big to me... I would try & reduce it to 40kb or 20kb) ? 

I do this with a main .php file which loads up all my CSS files & this supposedly reduces the amount of times the server requests files (similar to the use of one .css file using @import for other .css files, but supposedly faster). 

I also employ compression via php with the above:

http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/weblog/web-development/css/the-definitive-css-gzip-method/

I'd imagine this might add-up over-time, but I would also recommend reducing the amount of div's in the site design, & possibly use more CSS Tables, rather then both div's & tables by themselves (I'm only going on a curosry glance at the css files, so maybe I missed something). 

kiba:

Bandwidth is cheap and keep getting cheaper. I don't see why are you worried.

We are currently using 6 terabytes per month, and that is going up quickly. I don't know if that's a lot, but even if it doesn't cost that much, we'll have to get more hardware sooner if we don't keep it in check.

liberty student:

<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value= LOADS OF DATA HERE

This is a good idea, but the viewstate is needed for some things, but not others, so it’s a process of careful elimination.  It's already much smaller than it could be, but what I really need is developers to go through my code.

gcopenhaver:

I saw on the idea of a bittorrent server on the Brainstorming wiki page, which could potentially save large amounts of bandwidth from people downloading large files (video, audio, pdfs, etc).  I'm assuming these large files are served through the same connection and/or hosting account as the rest of the website.

Yes, unfortunately I don't know how to do this.  It would have to be automated because we have so many files.

HeroicLife:

This is a good idea, but the viewstate is needed for some things, but not others, so it’s a process of careful elimination.  It's already much smaller than it could be, but what I really need is developers to go through my code.

Right.  I'm not familiar with whatever the VIEWSTATE is tied to.  Most of the front end is very well coded from a web standards perspective.  It's very clean and well organized.

As far as other areas, I believe that the MP3s might be targets for re-encoding, and I'm wondering if more video shouldn't be ported to Youtube or Google video.

I don't know that you can cut your bandwidth usage by 33%,  but you might be able to cut it by 10% which buys you a little time...

 

liberty student:

Most of the front end is very well coded from a web standards perspective

I  wrote a bunch of regext expressions to convert the content in the database to XHTML I am now testing a tool (Aggiorno) to do the same for static files.  I am aiming for 100% XHTML strict compliance.

liberty student:

believe that the MP3s might be targets for re-encoding, and I'm wondering if more video shouldn't be ported to Youtube or Google video.

Yes.  Realistically, though, it wont happen unless someone volunteers.

liberty student:

I don't know that you can cut your bandwidth usage by 33%,  but you might be able to cut it by 10% which buys you a little time...

I’m hoping that the 80/20 rule will work here.  On other projects, I’ve been able to reduce bandwidth usage over 90%.

HeroicLife:

gcopenhaver:

I saw on the idea of a bittorrent server on the Brainstorming wiki page, which could potentially save large amounts of bandwidth from people downloading large files (video, audio, pdfs, etc).  I'm assuming these large files are served through the same connection and/or hosting account as the rest of the website.

Yes, unfortunately I don't know how to do this.  It would have to be automated because we have so many files.

I have no idea how it would be done using Microsoft Windows.

I think it should be relatively easy using Linux.

Really??