The Embedded Imaging Fluctuation

[WeatherGuesser]

A little confused......

I'm seeing posted edited and images redacted, admonishments posted not to embed images, yet I'm still seeing large animations posted, sometimes several per page in addition to quite a few other large images. I'm also seeing calls for donations and funding.

A 3.5Mb animation still uses high bandwidth every time someone views or reloads a page, no matter if it's on a source site or if it's rehosted on an image site. If 100 people view a page with a 3.5Mb animation, that's 3.5Mb x 100 passing through Storm2K's servers. I don't see what's being saved by doing that other than not having a link change as new images are loaded on the source sites. I understand the point of archiving in that aspect.

But if the point is to save on bandwidth, that isn't happening. Rehost the image if it isn't violating any copyrights to do so, then post a link (preferably with the file size noted) in the thread so that people can choose to view it or not.

Can someone clarify the position, policy and purpose on this?

[tolakram]

Embedded images do not cost storm2k any bandwidth. The bandwidth is used by whoever stores the image.

So if I embed an image from tropicaltidbits, for example, without first copying that image to imageshack or another image site then everyone who even views the thread will load that image from tropical tidbits, killing their server. This is why it's critical to first copy the image to a site that is set up for massive bandwidth usage, or link to the image instead of embedding it. Linked images can still put a huge load on the source server, if everyone wants to look at it, but at least the source server will not get hit by everyone who is simply viewing the thread.

Code: Select all


[img]mypoorserver.com/somecoolimage.jpg[/img]  <--- my server gets killed
[img]imageshack.us/someimage.jpg[/img] <--- imageshack takes the bandwidth



The image policy is NOT to reduce the load for each viewer. If your connection can't handle the image sizes then use a browser feature to turn off images.

[Dave]

Here's another example Weatherguesser. I load all my recon pictures to my weather server fallsky.com so when someone views the recon thread and see's the pictures they are pulling bandwidth from me not Storm2K.

I've got an unlimited bandwidth server so it doesn't matter if the jpg or gif file size is 5 meg, 5k or even 50 bytes the bandwidth comes from me no other site which pulls the load off of the other image companies. Plus it's simpler for me to load to my server than log into photobucket, imageshack, or anywhere else. I grab the picture, crop it, ftp it onto the server, grab the url and post.

Here's the stats for the fallsky server for the first 7 days of August:

Total

Number of Vists 672,277

Sitewide Hits (all pages including pictures): 3,129,305

Bandwidth Used: 12.24 GB

So a portion of that 12.24 Gig of bandwidth (recon pictures) isn't being pulled from the Storm2K server but coming from mine instead which saves S2K in the end.