throttling back on php-ads

it's using too much bandwidth.

[esllou]

I am trying to find a way of reducing the amount of bandwidth being gobbled by php-ads.

Currently half my hits and about 15-20% of my overall bandwidth is coming from this one script..5.5gb so far this month! Ouch!

I have just taken it totally off the student half of my teacher/student education site but that is only about 10% of my site. Today I took the php-ads tags off my home page which is another 10-15% of my site usage taken care of.

I need the flexibility that it gives me on the rest of the site though...maybe there is another lighter-on-resources solution available?

How have other webmasters dealt with this problem?

Thanks in advance....

[mincklerstraat]

This is most likely not the nature of the script, but the configuration - what's going into it, what you've told it to do. If you've got ads that are using images that are really big, trimming down those images in kb would be a good start. See how big each of these is, check how often you are rotating your ads per pageview.

If your ad rotation script uses php to deliver the images (i.e., when you view source, it says things like <img src="something[b].php[/p]">, or has an htaccess file in the images directory with some cache control information, there's a very good chance the images themselves are not being cached, which will also gobble your bandwidth. Then part of this may be your ad-delivering script's 'fault' - it's not caching the images so download statistics of the images themselves can be used for counting impressions. A bit sloppy, I'd say- better to incorporate a 1x1 transparent pixel php image with a unique parameter per page that's not cacheable to do this kind of counting. Don't know if there are such scripts around.

[esllou]

thanks for the reply

this is what my stats are telling me:

/php-ads-new/adjs.php
/php-ads-new/adimage.php

those two files are responsible for 5.5gb of bandwidth so far this month. Now I don't know:

- if that "includes" the image sizes which aren't that big anyway...mostly standard 12/15kb banners. Going by the bandwidth usage, I would have thought yes.

- exactly how php-ads works and why it is such a resource hog on my site.

another thing....my "pageviews" stats are worse than useless every since I started using it. I know I "really" get about 15-25000 pageviews a day whereas my stats have shown, since the day I started using php-ads, that I get anywhere from 70,000 to 200,000 pageviews a day. I think each ad zone loads two or three "php pages" like those I mentioned above (adlog.php is another) and I might have up to 3 ad zones a page.

which means pageviews are now as useless a stat for me as the traditional "hits" stat which counts 10 hits for every page loaded.

[mincklerstraat]

Your ads script is probably adding an iframe in which it puts the adds. 12-15k may not seem like much, but if you're rotating banners, and some surfer keeps their browser open to one of your pages behind some other window, this can really add up fast. Say you're rotating ads every twenty seconds, that's 45K extra per minute - and with tabbed browsing, a lot more users now will be keeping pages open.

The extra pageview stats will probably be from the iframes that get reloaded when your banners change on a pageview.

Read your script docs to see if they have any way of making the ad banners cacheable, or if it's possible to turn off rotation after x minutes. Or simply don't have your banners change during the pageview. If your script docs don't answer the question, try posting on the forums of the ad script.

[esllou]

No, there isn't ANY rotation once a page loads...that really would eat up the bandwidth!