Saving the Sift one step at a time
The current #2 on Videosift
http://www.videosift.com/video/Fox-News-Declares-War-on-Canada
It has a fair amount of comments so there are a lot of avatars loaded each time this video is clicked.
I saved all the avatars to my computer and the cumulative size of the avatars was 132 KB. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it's probably responsible for a large part of the bandwidth used to provide this page to the user. Especially if you consider that most of the Sift's design is based on code and not graphics. Importantly the top videos usually have long comment threads, thus a lot of avatars, and the top videos are also those most watched.
So my point is this: The Videosift can save a lot of money on bandwidth if they only allow avatar images which are externally stored, like on your own webspace.
Or you could upload a maybe bigger and better avatar to VideoSift for a nice price. People must pay much extra if they want to buy the option of animated avatars
http://www.videosift.com/video/Fox-News-Declares-War-on-Canada
It has a fair amount of comments so there are a lot of avatars loaded each time this video is clicked.
I saved all the avatars to my computer and the cumulative size of the avatars was 132 KB. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it's probably responsible for a large part of the bandwidth used to provide this page to the user. Especially if you consider that most of the Sift's design is based on code and not graphics. Importantly the top videos usually have long comment threads, thus a lot of avatars, and the top videos are also those most watched.
So my point is this: The Videosift can save a lot of money on bandwidth if they only allow avatar images which are externally stored, like on your own webspace.
Or you could upload a maybe bigger and better avatar to VideoSift for a nice price. People must pay much extra if they want to buy the option of animated avatars
16 Comments
EdeotScrew avatars. I just picture you all naked and oiled up.
Mmmmmm....
cybrbeast^If I do that with your avatar it would be a major turn-off
EdeotYou know that thing I wear on my head that everyone thinks is a stovepipe hat?
That's a condom. Only one I could find that fits.
MarineGunrockI am wholeheartedly against animated ANYTHING on this site. All those things that other forums do that VideoSift doesn't, I fucking HATE. Animated avatars, animated emoticons, signatures, all that shit. it just clutters the page and looks like complete ASS. I am all for locally stored content. I don't know shit about the workings of websites or webservers, but what if things that never change were stored on the local machine so when you request the page, you don't actually need all of it. I.E. Title bar, some of the sidepanels, avatars, etc. It might all be very small amounts of data, but when you have it downloaded from the server thousands of times a day, I'm sure it could all add up VERY quickly.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
All of the avatars are stored on the CDN system at static1.videosift.com - at the moment we pay a flat rate per month for I think 10 gigs of transfer, and we haven't gone over that most months. Also, if we allowed hosting on other sites it could slow down the loading of pages and break a lot of avatar images, if the source page is removed.
gwiz665It would open up for misuse. Both animated avatars and for what we could call "not appropriate" avatars, which we would have little control over. Like dag mentions, there is also the 404 issue.
As far as I can see, VS is actually very sleek in bandwidth compared with how many users there are. I don't think this would do enormously much even in a dream scenario.
cybrbeastAh right, if they are that cheap compared to running the rest of the Sift it wouldn't make much sense to have them off-site indeed.
campionidelmondoSomeone mentioned this in the fundraiser thread already: For video pages with lots of comments, just load the oldest/newest 3 onto the page and include a "show all comments" button. I bet alot of people who watch videos (especially top 15 videos) don't care for the comments.
This would create a win/win situation, as it'll decrease loading times as well and I think clicking one button to dynamically add the rest of the comments to the page is no hassle.
joedirtThe avatars are a non-issue and a cost of doing business. All the video thumbnails are stored on the same CDN. Since they haven't exceeded the bandwidth yet with all avatars, icons and thumbnails, I don't think this is a big deal. Hopefully your browser is caching them anyways. You aren't suggesting removing all the thumbnails for videos??
Anyways, if you aren't using CPU or memory, hosting is pretty cheap.
imstellar28 says...a site run by retards + a site frequented by retards = 404 error in 2 years.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
^troll.
Feel free to just fuck right off anytime.
mauz15>> ^imstellar28:
a site run by retards + a site frequented by retards = 404 error in 2 years.
epic fail troll
campionidelmondo>> ^imstellar28:
a site run by retards + a site frequented by retards = 404 error in 2 years.
So when your site died after 2 years you decided to come here? Why?
Edeot>> ^imstellar28:
a site run by retards + a site frequented by retards = 404 error in 2 years.
And yet you spam boring economic shit any chance you get.
berticuswow stellar.. true colours eh?
still having trouble understanding what an average is? heeehehehe.
gwiz665Good thing that's not the case here, eh?
>> ^imstellar28:
a site run by retards + a site frequented by retards = 404 error in 2 years.
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