No that is way out of the question DH Unless someone wants to upload them single file... no way just way too much of a hassle unless it's an FTP We got like 50 billion pics But... we can always host em on magbum maybe

Wait a minute... are we forgetting that GYR and Vizzed are on the same server? It's not just Vizzed eating the bandwidth. Those large images on the Emulator/ROM don't help.

I'm not forgetting I know that I'm apart of GYR Yea I think I might change those big pics kinda not liking them too much. Might just take em down.

lol.... thats alot of time!

I know I'm suppose to be on break by now but I've extended it by 1 day since this is a pretty big priority to have fixed.

I've greatly reduced the size of the retro game room images by shrinking them down and converting them to PNG.

At least a 40 MB file size deduction of box art graphics for all the games. Here's my report of the deduction for each screenshots of each system.

Game Boy
Before: 30.4 MB
After: 6.8 MB

Game Boy Color
Before: 43.1 MB
After: 38.8 MB

Sega Genesis
Before: 157.4 MB
After: 70.2 MB

Game Gear
Before: 3.1 MB
After: 1.6 MB

Nintendo
Before: 125 MB
After: 28.5 MB

Sega Master System
Before: 13.6 MB
After: 9.3 MB

TOTAL Before: 373.2 MB
TOTAL After: 155.2 MB

So total deduction of box art and screenshots is about 258 MB, which is a huge deduction considering how many people are viewing all these images per a day.

If there is a noticeable quality loss for anything in the game room, let me know because I'd hate for something to appear ugly now.

Wow, that's pretty good. But I'm not sure if that's enough. I mean, the file sizes were cut by a factor of greater than 2, but at the rate we were using up bandwidth...

I cut the bandwidth of images by 2/3 (about), should help a lot I think, especially since the images were sucking up more bandwidth than the actual roms. But as traffic increases, we'll have to consider other solutions but for now this should help but will still probably have to upgrade to 1 TB Bandwidth before the month ends.

Try cleaning out the site. There's some old crap I've seen that looked like it should have been gone a while ago...Actually, I'm just saying stuff, sorry.

lots of old threads aren't the problem... if they are old then they aren't being accessed. I agree that reducing the sizes of those pictures should help a lot but you're stuck with higher bandwidth needs because of the retro game room.

Another resort would be Ecan Solutions

I didn't see prices on servers but their ordinary hosting seemed awfully high.

Contact them, it's ErkDog aka Matt.

He's got me on some ballen ass hosting. Ask him what he could offer you. Worst he or yuo could say is no.

Ok I'll look into it.


I just decreased the bandwidth usage of the images in the game room by another 1/3.

This time I've made it so it only displays 15 games per a page instead of 30 as before. I also decreased the size of the images even more (and in some cases, increased the image quality).

So overall, the images should definitely not be an issue any more.

The images will suck up around 1/6 as much as they did before, that's a huge deduction. If I see the roms as using up to much bandwidth, I'll deduct the daily Viz each user gets just for going to the board from 50 Viz to 25 Viz which would mean the users would be able to play half as many games and we'd than enforce some sort of IP detection when users sign up to prevent people from making multiple accounts.

Good news is that bandwidth has dropped by 6 GB a day after the changes I've made.
I'll still be forced to upgrade the site's bandwidth to 1 TB a month (since at this new rate GYR and vizzed would suck up around 650 GB a month) but thankfully I won't have to upgrade it any higher than that.

When I throw all the styles for the game room into a .css file that'll cut bandwidth even more but I wont have time to do that for a while.

Also as I mentioned before, I could reduce the Viz each user earns a day from 50 to 25 Viz. This will reduce the amount of games each user can play but of course we'd have to implement a way to prevent duplicate accounts from being made.

I don't know anything about decreasing bandwith, but it seems that by doing things with the images you guys are decreasing it. Not sure if this would help, but would decreasing the amount of times that the page for a game auto-refreshes help?

The auto-refreshing shouldn't matter to much since it's just reloading a cached page.

Ok, that makes sense. lol, not very technically inclined =)