Bandwidth usage

[Chruser]

I'm just a little curious about the bandwidth usage for vbulletin, and how effective the different compressions really are. If I buy a license, and set up a board, I might want to know what I'm getting into. The owner of the forum I'm "working" at didn't really complain about excessive bandwidth usage, but I just want to be sure.

[tubedogg]

The only thing that can determine your bandwidth usage is how many members you have and how active they are.

[Chruser]

An example, lets say I have 100 "active" members, ie, they are always logged on, and click on stuff. What would a monthly bandwidth cost be for that? Then lets assume that the host (possibly me in the future) would enable a level 9 gzip compression, what would be worse than without it, performance-wise, and how much bandwidth would you "save"?

[krs-one]

Don't enable level 9 compression, you might have some pretty funky results. For best optimizations, use level 1.

I think the default temlpate for vB that displays the mainpage (forumhome + it's *bit templates) is, when outputted to the browser, is about 55-60K. Multiply that by 100 (use 55K), you get 5500 or 5.5 megs. Now, thats just the home page. Each time a user clicks on a thread, thats adding more and more.

Take a look at www.hardforum.com for a really big forum, very impressive as well.

Just my $0.02.

-Vic

[tubedogg]

With the optimum level of compression (1) you can see between 5% and 90% savings in bandwidth versus not using compression. Most people see about 30% to 40%.