Hi all,

I've finally got a BOINC account ID so I can post on these forums and keep you all updated.

I big thank you to all those people who have tried to reduce the load on my server.

Site status
===========

There are now over 300+ users and more are joining on an hourly basis.

How can you help?
=================

There are two ways you can do this:

1) Do not have a background image, or if you do have one, try reducing the file size of the image.

2) Do not use your signature repeatedly.

***Important news for xxx@web.de users***
=========================================

Any e-mails sent by my site to this domain get bounced and I therefore have no way of contacting you. I do not know if this is a problem with my host or your domain.

For the time being I have been deleting these accounts as they cannot be activated. Please either inform your host or use an alternative e-mail address.

Current bandwidth status
========================

The subdomain seti2.mundayweb.com has used 1354.75 Mb worth of bandwidth. I have configured my hosting account to suspend the site when the bandwith hits 8 Gb and thus leave 2 Gb for my other domains and the main site, and e-mail.

Thanks to the donations I have received, I can now purchase a "bandwidth top-up" to supplement my 10 Gb limit. If the bandwidth needs topping-up, then I will do so to allow the site to remain operational.

What's happening to solve this issue?
=====================================

I've had several offers for mirrors and I believe I have worked out a solution.

A friend is setting up a server for me to try - I'll let you know how it goes.

The site will be updated soon to restrict the file size of images used for backgrounds.

And finally...
==============

A big thank you to all those who have donated and to Darren and Jorden for answering various queries on this forum.

Best regards and happy crunching,

Neil Munday

Only here to serve... :)

------------------
Jordâ„¢

> 1) Do not have a background image, or if you do have one, try reducing the
> file size of the image.

I did experiment by reducing the file size, but saw no difference in the resulting sig file size? In one case, the smaller image file made a larger sig file. (By about 2K IIRC)

> And finally...
> ==============
>
> A big thank you to all those who have donated and to Darren and Jorden for
> answering various queries on this forum.

No problem at all, glad to be of what little help I could.

And Neil, if you ever need the option we discussed in email, it'll still be there.

Darren

> > 1) Do not have a background image, or if you do have one, try reducing
> the
> > file size of the image.
>
> I did experiment by reducing the file size, but saw no difference in the
> resulting sig file size? In one case, the smaller image file made a
> larger sig file. (By about 2K IIRC)
The server still has to fetch the image from wherever it is loading from. The resized output may add a little to it.

But if you make the image 280px by 81px big, save it as a PNG file, it'll reduce in size enormously. The background I now use is only 5KB. (The one I used earlier was a 538KB file I reduced to 37KB. I am waiting for Neil to get his bandwidth problems out of the way, before I switch them again. ;))

----------------------
Jordâ„¢

> But if you make the image 280px by 81px big, save it as a PNG file, it'll
> reduce in size enormously. The background I now use is only 5KB. (The one I
> used earlier was a 538KB file I reduced to 37KB. I am waiting for Neil to get
> his bandwidth problems out of the way, before I switch them again. ;))

I'll have to try a .png. I did a .gif because that's what Neals page said works best.

OK. More tests.
Current background: 285x80 All images converted from 62K .bmp of 3D render.
18K .gif = 32K sig.
13K .jpg = 48K(!) sig.
Didn't even bother to test the .png, as it is the same size as the .bmp.

I'll re-render at 280x81, and do some further experimenting. I eyeballed the 285x80, and was slightly off.

Edit: Oh, and your sig file is 13K.

<a> [/url]

lol, I know that. 13.2K even. :)

But as you may also see, I don't use the transparency on/off options. You are.
Maybe testing with and without transparency will help?

edit: Looking at pictures from Neil's gallery, checking the ones that are text only, no background, they range between 0.85KB and 2KB. We're doing something wrong here. ;)
----------------------
Jordâ„¢

> edit: Looking at pictures from Neil's gallery, checking the ones that are text
> only, no background, they range between 0.85KB and 2KB. We're doing something
> wrong here. ;)

I tried a few different changes to my background picture a couple days back and could never make any sense out of how it got to the sizes it did. That's why I just dropped the background picture all together. Now using trans=off to get a solid background, my file is 1.01K, but is the same with transparency on.

Well, I got it down to 11K by simplifying it. :)

<a> [/url]

Like Darren, I just got rid of my background pic and made a separate jpg of it to attach to one end of it. Looks just as good but buts the things down in size quite a bit.

One thing you guys could try (especially those using GIF or PNG backgrounds) is to decrease the color depth of the background to 255 or 254 colors. When the server creates the stats it will add colors to the image (text and border colors), increasing the file size. By keeping the total colors after the server tweaks with it to 256 or less, one byte per pixel can be used, reducing file size.

I did this, and while it only shaved off 4 bytes for my background, the final image size after the server put in the text and border came down by 1K.

_____________________________________

Everyone with a (not entered) signature, please stay calm. It's probably either the Berkeley fetch that went wrong (updates are every 8 hours), or it's something Neil did with the extended characters reprogramming on his site. Although I don't see what extended characters there were in Heffed or Darren their sigs, but okay. ;)

I've emailed Neil 2 minutes after seeing this behaviour start. Yet at that time the servers were also full of the mySQL errors, so I suspect a coincidence.


----------------------
Jordâ„¢

Thanks J&H.....I was sweating for a minute....peace Xi3...reporting from Chongqing China 07/09/04 22:27 local time
<a> [/url]

GIVE SOME NICE ADVANCED OPTIONS LATER , WELL DONE UP ON NEIL'S SITE , KEEP DOING Y'A THIN' Y'A LL PE@CE !

Nie weekend and thank you for the great counter ;-)
[/url] [/url]

blah! I wish i read this before I made my sig...gah, i'll have to re-work it to make it smaller now ;)

and yes, thanks for the great counter!

***Important news for xxx@web.de users***
=========================================

Any e-mails sent by my site to this domain get bounced and I therefore have no way of contacting you. I do not know if this is a problem with my host or your domain.

For the time being I have been deleting these accounts as they cannot be activated. Please either inform your host or use an alternative e-mail address.

That was me,

i changed the E-mail addy

i have two Accounts, and both with an Addy ux1xx@web.de and ux2x@web.de, so the problem is at your host i think, but i changed it.

Thanks for your Great Work Neil


Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli [/url]

Message from Neil Munday:

"I am working on a fix on the site. I hope to have everything back up & running by 8.30pm BST (British Summer Time). Sorry for the inconvenience."


----------------------
Jordâ„¢

hey men no problem that you make a --GREAT JOB--THANKS for this power counter
[/url] [/url]

> 2) Do not use your signature repeatedly.


wow! thats a toughie...

but great work on the sig man, seriously!
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