Can someone explain bandwidth ?

[tonyg Goomba & Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close tonyg]

In relation to a web page/site. Is there a standard by which it is measured-i.e. length of time ? How is it calculated ? What happens when it is exceeded on a web page/site ?

[bnoble Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close bnoble]

It's measured in (size of pages delivered/time). For example, if you have a hosting contract, your web site may be allowed to serve 4 GB (roughly, 4 billion bytes) each week/month/whatever---the data per unit time is called your "service level". If your web site becomes more popular, you have to buy a larger contract, allowing you to serve more data each week/month/whatever.

What happens if you reach your limit depends on your contract. Some sites just shut you down until your next service-level period begins. Others charge you a premium for going over your limit.

[Guest Close Quarterbore]

Yup, that pretty much sums it it!

Basically bandwith is a measure of data going from and going to a server. Some files are small and use very little bandwith to transfer while other files (due to their size) require far more bandwith.

Bandwith can be used to describe both the total amount received and sent BUT it also can refer tothe capacity of the server or the connections to and from the server to supply the data.

Another concept that is different then bandwith, but also plays a roll, is server load. A website like this that is extensively database driven requires a server to work much harder then a website that used normal fixed HTML pages or a few images. Sometimes, server load is the larger problem then bandwith.

Our bandwith for this site has been right about 40 Gigabites a month for the past several months. That is a LOT of page views!

[camachinist Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close camachinist]

Such issues are why I highly compress video and images I serve up on my web site. It puts more of a load on the downloading computer's processor, but uses less bandwidth and costs me less.

My wife, OTOH, routinely exchanges 4-5MB picture files with friends; such images would be under 100KB by the time I got through with them But, since she sends everything through Yahoo, it's not my problem

Pat

[Guest Close Quarterbore]

I called the hosting company this week to ask why our site seems to be getting slower and I learned of another significant concern, and a reason we will be upgrading servers early next year, has to do with the number of concurrent connections.

Our site encourages people to stay here and keep looking. That was the goal when it was built, but our hosting package has limits to the number of concurrent connections. If too many people all try to open pages at the same time the server slows down as it only does so many actions at the same time. If it is too bad, some of these members will get a SERVER BUSY error.

When we move to the new server system, perhaps in January or February (I need to see when I will have time for a major overhaul again) we will be moving to a server that will allow over 10X the connections that we are allowed to have now. The problem is, it also costs about 5x as much so until it become necessary I have not been anxious to spend the money.

In our case, server load and concurrent connections is FAR more of a problem then bandwidth!

[tonyg Goomba & Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close tonyg]

That may just explain the problem that occurred that prompted me to ask the question.