UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing Admin Zone bandwidth usage and the shoutbox

Question for the gurus.

Will emoticon usage in the shout box take up a large amount of bandwidth.

I'm trying to understand bandwidth usage for the site. Animated emoticons are used constantly in the shout box.

Of course it could. Especially if you have large animated ones.
The amount of bandwidth used will depend on what you have available to users and how much they use it.

So anytime one of these emoticaons that are hosted on the site get displayed, it would go against the allotted bandwidth usage per month we have through our hosting site?

Well yes. Any animated image is larger than normal.
But once it is loaded to the browser the bandwidth is done. Usually.
But if say you have 10 net new visitors to your site. And then they load up large animated images in their browser. You take a hit for a moment.

Don't know where you are going with this.
You would either need to have a extremely busy site and or some large gifs to really make a impact on bandwidth.

Whenever I turn the shoutbox on, people complain that the forum slows down. I typically have 100 to 150 people on, plus 80 or more spiders.

I would think the spiders would cause more slowdown to bandwidth than emoticons... 80 is a lot of spiders going through your info and pulling up posts. I usually notice a difference when I hit about 60 spiders. On average I usually only have 32-40 spiders at a time though.

Dunny