How bandwith intensive are forums, and what software uses less, im currently using vBulletin (3.6.0) how bad (or good) is that for bandwith usage?

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That is really a general question. There are a lot of factors that come in to play with this. IE. Tons of graphics vs a mainly text based layout will result in less bandwidth usage. Where as if you allow attachments and another forum does not you will result in less. I could build a theme in phpbb that would use 4x the bandwidth of VB and vice versa. There are just too many variables to make a good analysis. Overall I don't believe forums to be all that bw intensive, but as stated there are alot of things that go in to that.

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I see, thanks for that LarryB

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I have found a normal forum to be not such a resource hog ans I feaerd. And I do have graphical intense sites, but they seem to fare well in this matter. I agree that it's hard to say since many forums are filled with graphics, others not ...

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If forums are heavy on anything, it's database access. Unless you've got a wildly successful forum, 50GB of bandwidth should be able to accomodate even the most ridiculously graphical theme I can think up.

The forum software themselves, in my expierence, don't make any significant differences. It's all based on what you let the users do and have privaledges to. If you don't allow them all kinds of attachments and so on, then you save a lot of BW there. If don't let them have rediculously oversized PMs then you'll save there (you have a 1000 users with a 100 possible PMs people will just keep saving them and everytime they go to visit their inbox that's bandwidth sucking there).

If you push the limits of the avatars and all allow them to have an avatar of 150x150 that will suck bandwidth as well. remember everytime that page is viewed, that image is transfered. Animated avatars = mass bandwidth!

personally I think 120x120 is more than large enough for an avatar.

Sigs don't apply to much seeing as they the images are normally outsorced as it is.

Another way to reduce bandwidth is to not allow images that don't have .gif, .jpg and so on. That way they can't link the attached images into the image tag in a thread. If the really want to see the image then they can click the thumbnail.

That's about all I got for you right now.

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It really depends on how many visitors you get and what you allow them to do. If they are allowed to upload large images and files and lots of people download them it'll eat up loads of your bandwidth.

Mark

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