How much bandwidth does this site consume per month?

About 20 gigs/mo give or take an odd gig.

Originally posted by Chicken
About 20 gigs/mo give or take an odd gig.

Chicken, last time I heard, mod_gzip is not installed on the server that WHT is hosted. So, I take it this 20GB is non-compressed bandwith, right? CMIIW ... If so, then Carlos should probably install mod_gzip since the bandwith usage will be cut down by a factor of 3 or 4 by using mod_gzip ....

cheers,
:beer:

Are you saying that if a site is using like 100GB/month without mod_gzip, it would only use about 25-33GB/month with mod_gzip? Also, I assume mod_gzip will make access to the site slower, is it noticable?

Mod_gzip has been installed thanks to Carlos and we'll know the effects of it by the end of this month.

Zolbian, considering mod_gzip was installed about 2 weeks ago, if you haven't noticed any slower access times then there's your answer :D

Originally posted by zolbian
Are you saying that if a site is using like 100GB/month without mod_gzip, it would only use about 25-33GB/month with mod_gzip?


I have this factor of 4 after comparing webalizer (records compressed data transfer by analyzing httpd log files) and mod_throttle (records the uncompressed data transfer). Look here ....

http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=11595

It also depends on what is being compressed. What kinda of compression ratio do you usually get when using winzip? I get anywehere between 10% to 600%, depending on the type of file ... so a factor of 4 might not be impossible at all (results may vary)


Also, I assume mod_gzip will make access to the site slower, is it noticable?

Quite in the contrary ... Assume a page (with all images, etc) is 60K in size. Assume mod_gzip compresses the page down to 30K. The compression (on the fly) will take less than 1 second, probably even in the mili seconds range (how long does it take your winzip to zip/unzip a file? :) ). If somebody is using 33.6 kbps modem (4KB/s), then the amount of time saved by downloading a compressed page is about 6 seconds ... So that person will feel he/she downloads the page much faster ...

I have found this page to be helpful: http://webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/

an particularly this:

http://webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/apachebench.html


cheers,
:beer:

Ask Eva 2000. He runs a extremely busy forum.
He once said with gzip installed he got 1x k page size instead of 1xx k size.

We are approaching 35gigs per month, I don't think gzip is enabled. :stickout

Originally posted by MattF
We are approaching 35gigs per month, I don't think gzip is enabled. :stickout
The sad part is . it IS enabled :( .. and working ;)

WOW :eek:

I can just imagine how much we would be using without gzip :eek:

I installed mod_gzip on the server I have my sites hosted on and I did some tests and I hit a 160KB page and am on a 28.8KB connection. Before I could begin to count, it was already fully loaded in my browser. I disable mod_gzip and it loads the 160,000 byte page at the usual speed (not being cached) and it shows such in the logs as well -- and then I enable it, hit the page and it is instant -- and the log reports 100% compression and shows the bytes in the log as being 321 bytes (yes, 1/3rd of one K!). I did the PHP test page and hit that without mod_gzip and it was about 65KB. I enabled mod_gzip and it's at about 4.5 KB (about 88 percent compression).

mod_gzip certainly works and it can work well -- depending on what your site runs and the content. I'd think that most of WHT's content would have a decent compression rate of at least 50% -- excluding images, etc. Binary files don't compress well -- images, zip files, etc... but text and HTML (including anything that outputs HTML such as PHP, CGI, etc.) are definitely better to have on such sites. mod_gzip is fast and in fact, most of the time the pages will appear (and will) load/transfer data faster, not slower. It does surely take a little time to have it compress it before it's sent, but you can also use temp files as well as actually pre gzipping the HTML files so they are transferred and not have the need to be compressed before being sent. Of course, pre gzipped files aren't going to work on content that is dynamic like most of this site's content.

However, the process of gzipping the files and transferring them, actually makes up for the CPU time it takes to read more data from the drive anyway and to transfer the larger file. So, it's not a bad idea to have it installed anyway, especially if it's an Apache core module (unless you're using Zeus or something, which I'm sure would work just as well). For me, pages can and do load at least 50% faster. However, you will also need to hit the pages in question with a browser that supports this. Older browsers do not and mod_gzip will pick up on this and send the content at the regular size, just as if mod_gzip isn't there -- because your browser doesn't support it.

Most browsers in the last couple of years do support this though. As long as it's installed, enabled and configured properly, it should make some sort of difference -- especially with a site like this, so if it's enabled and configured properly, than WHT must be getting nearly double the traffic to still at at 20+ GIG's/mo. Anyway, I'd definitely suggest anyone install mod_gzip, unless they don't have many HTML pages (HTML, PHP, CGI, etc.) on their site.