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Some High Bandwidth Usage?

I'm having a bit of trouble with the Pro version of Power Slide (latest version). Basically, it's using a huge amount of bandwidth. This bandwidth shows up in the cpanel stats under the robots section, as "Unknown robot (identified by empty user agent string)"... You can see an example of this occurring here (I have removed any reference to IP addresses or URLs for the time being while we fix this - I don't know if it represents a security risk so I'm playing it safe )..

202.x.xxx.xxx - - [21/Jul/2010:15:25:48 +0930] "GET /images/powerslide/img_6570.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 483117 "-" "-"
 
202.x.xxx.xxx - - [21/Jul/2010:15:25:48 +0930] "GET /images/powerslide/img_6490.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 687739 "-" "-"
 
xxx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [21/Jul/2010:15:25:48 +0930] "GET /modules/mod_powerslidepro/resizer.php?imgfile=http://www.example.com/images/powerslide/img_6570.jpg&full_image=1&max_height=305px&max_width=525px&stretch_image=0&stretch_thumbnail_image=0 HTTP/1.0" 200 58993 "http://www.example.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
 
xxx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [21/Jul/2010:15:25:48 +0930] "GET /modules/mod_powerslidepro/resizer.php?imgfile=http://www.example.com/images/powerslide/img_6490.jpg&full_image=1&max_height=305px&max_width=525px&stretch_image=0&stretch_thumbnail_image=0 HTTP/1.0" 200 65891 "http://www.example.com" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

There are thousands of these, and only relating to PSP. So you can see that for every request to resizer.php, the fullsize image is also being pulled down (by the IP address of the server itself). This is causing a huge use of bandwidth. The total usage for all non-robot users is 6Gb, while this script alone has used 20Gb (all logged under the robots section, as "Unknown robot (identified by empty user agent string)")

So I guess my questions are:

  • Is this normal? It seems odd to me that the script needs to use bandwidth, as the images and script are on the same server..
  • Is there any way to easily fix this? It's kind of a dealbreaker as far as using Power Slide Pro.

Lumo replied Something not making sense here...

Um... well that does not make sense - this is how the gallery images work:

When someone views a gallery - the gallery checks if the resized image exists in the cache folder. If not, it creates the image and displays it. It does this for the upcoming 2 images...

These images remain in the module cache folder ( server side - not the server cache ) until they are updated by the admin ( if the image or settings are changed in the component backend )...

So your logs make no sense - not trying to offend you in any way - but we have Power Slide running on large sites here with 10k plus users and the server bandwidth never goes over 10GB.

The only thing I can see is that the bandwidth could be due to local user cache (when a user views galleries) but that is just displaying images from the cache folder - like any site would, so I am not sure as to how you are getting these large amounts of data...

Unless I am confused, or misunderstanding something in your post?

marktce replied Thats what I thought...

Yes, that's all sounds like how I thought it should work.
This is why I'm so confused about why it's happening. I didn't expect this to be the usual way that PSP operates, otherwise I'm sure someone else would have mentioned it.

So just to recap, the site sits on a server - let's say it has the address 123.123.123.123
Everytime an image is called, it's generating a request from 123.123.123.123 - it's as if it's downloading the image to examine it every time instead of seeing it 'locally'.

It's really got me baffled now..

What does it look like in a normal log? Do lines like the first two lines (the GET /images/powerslide/img_6570.jpg) etc appear at all?

Lumo replied Let me check for you...

Well... I can check for you - what logs are you looking at - your server cPanel logs? As in where are you seeing the high usage? I wonder if you server is not allowing cache images or something - and each time the image try to get placed they get deleted like 5 min later or something...

Lumo replied ...

Thanks for offering to check. I am seeing the usage when I goto AWstats in cPanel. In here, if I scroll down to the Robots / Spiders section, I can see that "Unknown Robot" has used a very large amount of bandwidth.

And back in cPanel, I am accessing the logs with the info that I mentioned in the posts above by going to the "Raw Access Logs". As for your question, the cache folder appears to hold the correct number of "resized" and "thumbnail" images.

Lumo replied We checked it out...

Well, we checked out our own cPanel logs as you described above - and our "unknown robot" is only doing about 800MB of traffic in a month... so thats good news, the bad news is that I now have no idea what is causing all your traffic.

We are however using a beta version of Kupo Slides (Power Slide 2.0) on our sites, which could have resolved the issue you are experiencing - but thats only going to be released in a week or two...

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