Sandaysoft

Why would you do that Ray? (probably because my comment above implied it ) You already have a 'processed' version of the page on your web server, all you need to do is remove the tick in Cumulus for 'FTP'. Then if the template gets updated again, all you need to do is re-enable FTP, once the updated page has uploaded to your server stop it FTP'ing again
No idea without taking a look at it, my gauge page is static and manually maintained (as it is a little different from the sample page I supply in the download). But as I outlined above, you don't actually need to edit the file at all.

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Mark
Wilmslow Astro Weather

The solution was so obvious I completely missed it! I've now unchecked FTP for that file and I shoudl know if it's okay in the next few minutes. Your second response is now redundant after doing the above.

To Tau Bootis (Mark), thanks for your suggestion but the simpler one is to do as Mark in Wilmslow suggests. Thanks all the same.

I've asked my web host a few times if there are any tools available to me so I can see how my monthly allowance is doing but haven't had an answer. Are any available or do you actually have to be the host before you can analyse the throughput? Having made these changes I'd like to know if they've made any difference without bothering my web host.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Try NetWorx Its free and should be just what you need.

http://www.v3.co.uk/articles/download_t ... 384#thanks

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Mark

Ray

You could also cut down on uploading most of the files except the Cumulus web tags file by re-writing them to include the cumuluswebtags.php file and then only displaying that data when the page is loaded.

This way your thismonthyear.htm becomes thismonthyear.php, noaa.php etc etc all exist on your web site but do NOT get transferred ever again (well, until you change the layout).

If you do this it can save you around 7.67 Mb a day or roughly 230 Mb a month just on those files (not sure how the figures were arrived at in mrcrossley's post - 154 Mb a week isn't 2.3 Gb per month.

In fact if you trim cumuluswebtags down (ask your yourself 'Do you gfeell lucky..'....errr no wrong thread - 'Do I need all the alarm tags" you can even cut that down quite a bit - remove comments and you can trim it down to about a 1/3 of the original size.

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Punctuation is the difference between 'Let's eat, grandma' and 'Let's eat grandma'

Another thing to look at (although you haven't mentioned this as being your problem but it can, and does hit some people very hard) is whether you let robots onto your site.

Googlebot and (think its) yahoo crawler (might be MSN, can't recall off hand) can chew through bandwidth liek youj wouldn't believe.

You can usually see through the stats available via your cPanel (or whatever your host uses) how much they are using - if anything over a couple of Mb a week you really should look at restricting them - on one data intensive site we ran googlebot alone was accounting for over 400 Mb per month of bandwidth - and it all comes of your alloted allowance!

Now, because we restrict ALL bots, we are lucky to see any bot or crawler go ver 1 or 2 Mb per month....If they don;t obey the robots.txt file - we simply ban the IP completely.

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Punctuation is the difference between 'Let's eat, grandma' and 'Let's eat grandma'

[quote="Tau Bootis]Try NetWorx Its free and should be just what you need.

http://www.v3.co.uk/articles/download_t ... 384#thanks[/quote]

Thanks Mark. It appears to monitor all your router traffic. Can it be configured to measure only the traffic to and from my webhosting servers? I don't need to know how much I've used surfing the web.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

It's an excellent suggestion and I'd love to do it. But being clueless about php would probably result in me completely messing up my pages. I do intend learning PHP when I retire but for now the pages need to stay as they are.


My monthly allowance of 3Gb is quite modest and my hoster will soon be ending the service he provides. So I need to look elsewhere and he has suggested one alternative that has a much higher monthly allowance in which case the problem goes away. In fact it probably has already as reducing my update time to 15mins will result in a 1.6Gb usage per month.


I'd have to be very lucky not to break something. I just kept adding extras to my Cumulus setup probably not realising the effect on bandwidth. I'm definitely a lean 'n mean person but I need the skills first.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

I don't have any control panel as such. I use FileZilla for uploading files to the server. The stats provided to me showed requests amounted to 0.5Gb per month and no mention was made of excessive robot activity. Presumably if you have a contract with a commercial organisation you get a cPanel tool that allows you to interrogate the server which I cannot currently do.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Converting the files to PHP is not as hard as it appears. The beauty of it would be that once done, you don't have to touch them again. So don;t go putting yourself down thinking you can't do it. If you know HTML enough to get pages up and running, PHP will be quite easy.

As for trimming down cumuluswebtags - two simple rules really:

Anything after a // can be deleted (including the //) as these are purely comments and not needed for processing (you would be surprised how bloated that file is (no people, not knocking it - in line documentation is ALWAYS needed but should be removed for a production file like this)

and

The tags are placed in sections - one of the latter sections (from memory it has a heading) is for alarms. If you aren't showing the alarms on your web site they can be removed without causing a problem.

It is always handy to have a local web server running - XAMPP or WAMP - then you can try all these changes on your local machine before placing them in the Cumulus data directories ready for FTP'ing to your site.

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Punctuation is the difference between 'Let's eat, grandma' and 'Let's eat grandma'

Ray,
A excellent piece of free network monitoring software is Wireshark, available here: http://www.wireshark.org/
Filters can be set up to create reports from all network activity down to just those packets to/from a single ip.
Takes a bit of work to get set up the way you want, but the results are worth it.
It'll work on single or multiple ethernet ports, the ideal setup being a dedicated port to a managed switch, where you could monitor any port on the switch via a second ethernet port on your pc, but single port operation is all that's needed to identify bandwidth usage issues.


Cheers,

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Graeme.
http://weather.gktnet.com/cumulus/index.htm

I'm sure I could eventually learn what to do. My main problem is lack of time.


I do use record lights on the all-time records page if we're talking about the same thing. The only other alarm I have enabled is the wind exceeding 30mph which plays a wav on my netbook. Nothing uploaded for that one.


That would be very helpful. I shall investigate, thanks.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Hi Graeme,

Thanks for the link. I watched one of the videos but it was pretty technical for a non-network guru. One question. Where would you run this software from? Logically I would expect it to be installed on the root of my webhosting area so it can monitor all inbound and outbound traffic.

Is that the case or am I just showing my lack of understanding on how you tell it only to read data to and from my account either via login parameters I supply or a http address?

Sorry to sound like a thicko but this is way different to what I expected.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Hi Ray
I have only just started to use this one my self but it does not appear to do a breakdown as you require, it does lots or other stuff though
If you are looking for another provider soon, I am on Plusnet and they give an excellent service and are very competitive on price.

Regards

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Mark

Hi Mark,

I'm still not getting notified of new posts so apologies if I'm late to any.

I'm trialling networkx which does give me an indication of the amount uploaded from my netbook so that's a starter. The fact that my web hoster was able to separate uploads from http downloads suggests you have to run the software on the server itself.

I'll put PlusNet on the shortlist, thanks.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.