Forum Moderators: bakedjake
This is really weird - I hope someone has seen this before and has some advice!
My host's raw statistics (and the warning email they sent me) show 58 GB of bandwidth for May so far. But using Sawmill to screen out 404's, I see just 367 MB of traffic during that time.
As far as I've been able to deduce, the problem is my Flash file. I've got a 195 KB .swf file posted on my home page. The Flash file is somehow pointing to a file called site_title.txt, which causes a server response 404 - and it does this thousands of times for every view of the home page.
For just one day, May 5th, my logs show 878 valid page views, and 96,000 404's, all from site_title.txt.
I figured out that this is due to the Flash file, because I removed it for an afternoon and the weird page views issue disappeared during that time.
Does anyone have any ideas? I didn't create the Flash file, an outside contractor did, and I know he's not that experienced with Flash. Could it be something in the way he optimized or saved the file?
Thanks very much for any help!
I assume the text file is called numerous times from the flash file, but the figures you're giving are huge. Do you have a custom 404 file which is called each time? If so, switch back to a default one for the time being. Oh, and fire/sue your contractor too!
<added>Oh, and welcome to WebmasterWorld, Skyling!</added>
I already pulled off the file, to stop my bandwidth overage charges.
I've talked to the Flash guy and he doesn't know anything about the site_title.txt file. If I get him to send me the source files, is there some way I can find out? I don't know Flash very well either....
It's a while since I did any amount of Flash scripting, and I never was an expert anyway, but here's what I think is happening-
The flash clip that you're using is trying to reference an external file with the site's title in it.
The reason you're getting so many requests and eating up all that bandwidth (again, prefix all of these statements with a big "I think..."), is that the flash file either is, or contains a movie clip that cycles continuously (like an animated gif), and requests that file every time it starts/completes a cycle!
Incidentally, if I'm right about this, the part of the flash movie containing the reference to the external file should be changed so that the site title file is only called once. Even if there is a file at the correct location, there's certainly no need to call it dozens of times per visitor...
As for how you can confirm what the file is trying to do with that site_file.txt reference, try re-uploading the flash file and a file named "site_title.txt" with the site's title in it; I bet you a dollar your site title will suddenly start to appear somewhere in the flash movie... ;-)
The other thing you can do (more work!) is to get ahold of the original .fla file, and check out the actionscript inside each movie clip inside the movie as a whole, and also the actionscript attached to any given instance of each movie clip.
-B
58GB?! maybe you need a more experienced flash guy!
