Shoutbox And Bandwidth Usage Limit how do I keep bandwidth usage low?

[TripleH13 0]

i have seen my bandwidth usage is going up around 20mb a day is this normal. How do i stop it from going up so fast becuase its going to go over 500mb. I have a shoutbox installed is that whats doing it.

Notice from BuffaloHELP:

Modified topic title.

Edited March 6, 2006 by BuffaloHELP (see edit history)

[Trystim 0]

a shoutbox normally has a refresh tag that automatically refreshes it and if the site is having heavy traffic each refresh it is reloading information also if your site does store graphics in a person's cached due to settings they have set that also uses bandwidth having to redownload the graphics each time instead of pulling them from the cache.shoutbox is probably biggest causer of raised bandwidth though

[mama_soap 0]

TripleH,A link to your website would help Maybe one could look at screenshots of statistics related to the kind of traffic you get? Besides, do you have a fair idea of how active your shoutbox is? If you do, can you share it with us?Hope you keep us updated

[TripleH13 0]

well i have 21 registered users and 100 posts. The shoutbox has about 5-6 shouts. My current bandwidth is 126.78mb/500mb

[TripleH13 0]

ok i can confirm it was my shoutbox know. It was going up alot of mb for each shout. Then each time a new member came on it would do it aswell. Like in the couple days of having it installed it when up 100mb from 5 shouts. Is there anything i can do so it wont go up as high will using the shoutbox.

[Inspiron 0]

If possible, try disabling the auto-refresh feature for the shoutbox. Only get the new shouts when the entire page refreshes. This should greatly reduce your total bandwidth if you got alot of members using your site or forum.

[Dragonfly 0]

I was actually wondering how can a small shoutbox can actually take much bandwidth. I do have shoutbox in my site, and users who choose to participate in the shoutbox are more or less the same. My suggestion is : don't disable the auto-refresh, but you can increase the timer to more than one minute. Auto-refresh is such a cool function for shoutbox, because everyone don't feel like keep refreshing the shoutbox.

[TripleH13 0]

ok i will try that out. I hope it works out. I will post back and let you guys know if it works. It must be something though becuase it only had like 5 shouts in the shoutbox.

[tuddy 0]

Your thinking about how many shouts are happening, this isn't it. What they are talking about above, is if someone is just broswing your site with the shoutbox, then even though there not using the shoutbox, the auto-refresh is still happening. Now this shouldn't matter if you have a plain text based shoutbox, but most of have graphics, and have to drawn scripts, information with is what using your bandwith.A suggestion further up the page was about the cache, this is also another way to lower the bandwith, if you have set images throughout your site, that dont change for months then maybe then this could be of use. Also, do you have alot of images on your site.

[MaineFishing45 0]

Do you know if you have the Shoutbox, like the one here [D2]. Because I have it, and my bandwith is low compared what you are saying. I have auto-refresh enabled, and do you offer some downloads on your board?? Because that knocks up bandwith so easly. And Q's keep us updated.

[Saint_Michael 3]

No the shoutbox that is being used is caching all the shouts that are being shouted and when that cache keeps storing the info the more bw is being used up to retrieve it and since you have it most likly on more then one page your getting more bw used up.

What I recommend is that on a daily basis is clean that file out that stores all the shouts since most likly your using a txt file as a flat file to store that info in this should help a little bit as well.

But if that doesn't help then go to an outside source to use a shoutxbox like these sites that I recommend:

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
http://www.shoutmix.com/v3/login.php