Bandwidth problems ...

[JohnMurga]

Hi,

I just received the following notification :

Code: Select all

Bandwidth Notification
 
Bandwidth used: 42.112 GB
Bandwidth limit: 40 GB
 
Total over: 2.112 GB
Cost/GB: $5.00
 
Cost of bandwidth for December 2005: $10.56 US
 
Canadian customers will also be charged GST.

The costs don't really bother me, and I really put this down to people being off and browsing more over the Christmas period, however, this may become a problem in the future.

In the short term I have deleted the 128Mb "Mean" Puppy from the site to decrease usage, if you have a mirror for this file please add it to this post.

Cheers
JohnM

[MU]

I sent you a PM.
http://dotpups.de/murga/

Greets, Mark

[raffy]

The forum reached another record number of users today - this must be a pattern to expect this year. Already, enthusiasts are mentioning being timed out in the Forum.

I guess enthusiasts could localize the presence of Puppy and put up their own help sites, and offer service support for Puppy. This service support could earn its own revenue in the way of copyleft (see gnu.org). This Forum can focus on cutting-edge developments.

My $.02

[Ted Dog]

puptrix.org

[kethd]

John,
Please keep making whatever changes you have to, to keep the cost reasonable for you -- moving any large downloads to elsewhere seems like a good idea.

I'm worried that you could have gotten a much bigger surprise, at $5/GB. Can you get them to auto-throttle daily at midnight, to keep within the 40GB/mon?

But if the issue is just being able to support as many users as want/need the Forum, I think we need to find the resources to fulfill that. Is there currently a hard limit on number of forum users at once? How often is it reached?

[Alucard_the_dex]

Im on often enough to notice theres usualy about 6-20 users online at a time to my knowledge. Im also not a large fan of the hard limit.

[JohnMurga]

I am monitoring the situation, I don't see limits as a viable option.

I am hoping that with the ISO's off the site the levels will become resonable.

Cheers
JohnM

[J_Rey]

I am receiving reports on IRC that this forum has been down (again), so I was wondering can we transfer (redirect) this forum to forum.puppylinux.org and combine our resources? John, Raffy, Barry, others?

[J_Rey]

The forum reached another record number of users today - this must be a pattern to expect this year.

I agree. I've noticed a noticable increase in visitors to our IRC channel since the release of 1.0.7. I wouldn't expect Puppy interest to stop growing in the near future. So we especially need to resolve this before Puppy Linux 2.0.0 is released!

Also, I heard from a reliable source that we are in a unique niche, because of some problems with other popular LiveCD distros. For example, things are going bad behind the scenes with D.S.L., Feather's lead developer quit, and everything else is three times the size or no X or in alpha.

[kethd]

In the short term, it sounds like we can get by, by just reducing any attachment/upload/download traffic on the Forum site.

In the long run, we need a robust Forum infrastructure that can handle growth to at least an order of magnitude more than the current usage. And we need portability/disentaglement/redundancy of the Forum from anything else. And maybe some of us will have to pledge a few dollars a month to support this? Well, we need to have access to the bandwidth/usage statistics to have a real discussion...

If I were a heavy user of the Forum, and used 1MB/day 20 days per month, that would be 20MB/month. We are a long way from having 1000 such users, so as long as the Forum traffic is kept tightly focused on text msg content, 20GB of traffic sounds within the range of a Benevolent Benefactor, so we don't have to get tangled up with money matters at the group level.

[BarryK]

Anyway, John, I'll pay for your surcharge, out of the donations and cd sales. ...as long as it doesn't get out of hand of course!

Let me know your PayPal email address. I can send you a donation every three months or so.

Note, servage.net accounts now have a 500G per month download limit ...that's about 16G per day!

[Ted puptrix Dog]

Well, I would like to help. Custom Pups are not on the rise just yet last count puptrix had used only 5% of its 1000G limit and thats the largest usage in a ten day period.

[deshlab]

I am hoping that with the ISO's off the site the levels will become resonable.

In the short term, it sounds like we can get by, by just reducing any attachment/upload/download traffic on the Forum site.

It looks to me like the forum attachments alone are quite a lot of potential traffic already (check the new index in preparation at http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=49 ), so moving the isos and maybe other downloads (?) on the murga space to other mirrors is a very reasonable step. There are also quite a number of attachments that could be removed e.g. since they are outdated by newer versions - but I guess those are rarely downloaded so they only block some space on the server but cause no traffic.

[raffy]

Thanks, Ted. Actually, if your hosting has PHP and MySQL support, we can host sites of pup projects there. Servage.net offers large bandwidth quota, but it seems to be doing throttling. For example, after accessing a page with many images this morning, I could no longer access the other sites of puppylinux.org (or maybe it is my ISP doing the throttling, or servage.net is down?). The demo site I was trying to test is

http://puppylinux.org/members/demo

[Ted Dog]

I have done limited PHP and mySQL on my former host

[Ted Dog]

Which as not under heavy use, I have had problems with cross mail with a China based telephone equipment distributer Huawei hince H T E D may be used in asia

[mayakovski]

What about using google adsense to help generate some revenue? They seem very unobtrusive and can bring in a fair bit on money?

I would be happy to investigate more if there is interest.

[babbs]

If there is something I can do to help out, let me know how. (I can set up FTP logins on my server for a few trusted Puppy people to upload files to.)

I think that I presently have most of the current and past Puppy ISO releases posted (Barry produced ISOs, but no varients yet), and the idea of adding a few files doesn't scare me.

[puppian]

Maybe JohnM or others can upload larger attachments to dotpup.de / puptrix.org and then edit the posts with the new download links. Many dotpups in this page are hosted by this forum now.

Maximum file size of uploaded image can be reduced too.

I think phpBB would have the option to show messages in the past X days only. So really old posts can be set as 'not shown'. That may make searching faster too.

[JohnMurga]

Anyway, John, I'll pay for your surcharge, out of the donations and cd sales. ...as long as it doesn't get out of hand of course!

Let me know your PayPal email address. I can send you a donation every three months or so.

Note, servage.net accounts now have a 500G per month download limit ...that's about 16G per day!

Thanks for the offer, but there is no need.

Current usage statistics indicate that it must have been due to a seasonal spike and (maybe) the "Mean" puppy ISOs, which have been relocated to an account MU made available to me.

So far we are doing OK, I think usage will be fine from now on.

Cheers
JohnM