Sandaysoft

For the last two months I've received an automated email from the host of my website advising I've used 80% of my monthly allocation of 3Gb. As it was sent very close to the end of the month I didn't query it especially as in one of the months I was uploading a lot of NOAA files.

However, after receiving a warning 2 days ago I wrote asking why it would be so high when I haven't done anything special. I did have some days when I had over 100 hits and wondered if that was the problem. It seems not as this was the reply...

I've had a quick look at this months stats and 2Gb is taken up by FTP traffic (you/Cumulus uploading) and 0.5Gb is HTTP traffic (people visiting your web site).

I've had a look at stats for other Cumulus sites I host and they see to use about 0.5Gb in uploading per month. They generate around 16Mb of FTP uploads each day whereas you are 60+Mb. Is there anything else the Cumulus PC is uploading regularly?

I'm uploading 4 times the data of other Cumulus sites but I'm at a loss as to what the problem is. Here is a screenshot of my web uploads screen.

And here are the files on the server that are updated every 10 minutes.


I also use Mark Crossley's steel gauges but I'm not sure if they're heavy on webspace.

Any advice appreciated.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

What are your realtime and upload intervals set to Ray?
And what is the size of the webtags.php file?

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Mark
Wilmslow Astro Weather

realtime.txt + realtimegauges.txt = approx 1600 bytes every 30 seconds = 143 MB/month
html/php pages = approx 50 KB every 10 minutes = 220 MB/month
images (graphs etc) = approx 400 KB every 10 minutes = 1785 MB/month

Total = approx 2200 MB/month = approx 2GB/month

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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It's OK Ray, I got your intervals from your web site, I assumed your cumuluswebtags.php is a similar size to mine. A quick calculation shows...
Edit: Error in original calc!


So you need to look at those big files uploaded every 10 minutes. You can get rid of the gauges-ss.htm by just replacing the tags with the hard coded values - there is nothing really dynamic in there.

Also you are uploading the same raw data multiple times, you could look at rationalising that.

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Mark
Wilmslow Astro Weather

Just upping your upload time to 15 minutes will bring the total down to around 1.6GB.

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Mark
Wilmslow Astro Weather

Thanks for the replies Mark. I'm not getting a mail advising of replies.

My webtags.php is 49,406. Seems reasonable. Updates at 10mins as you found out.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Thank you Steve, much appreciated. I may need to switch to a 15 min interval.

_________________
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

By tags do you mean the location, lat, lon and altitude ones? I guess so as that's what I did with my season averages page.


Sorry, which raw data.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Hi Mark,

I've copied gauges-ss.htm from the server to my hard drive and replaced the location, lat, lon and altitude tags with actual values but after I save it and upload it to the server the gauges remain at zero and no updating takes place.

For now I've reinstated the processing of gauges-ssT.htm but if you could offer any pointers as to why it didn't work I'd appreciate it.

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Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

Hi Ray
This happened to me, it looks like your scripts are in the wrong place, check the code in the gauges page for the correct path. Or just put all the scripts in the same place as the gauges-ss.htm and also into the scripts folder and see if that works.

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Mark

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'