If your wondering where your bandwidth is going then I suggest fixing your jpg to png conversion.
I have uploaded 280k jpg in the screen shot section to see these files get converted to 6MB PNG files.
The dam profiles section is hogging more Bandwidth than your theme downloads...
The move to PNG was made a long time ago in order to get some better compression of images. There is nothing to really fix with the conversion process because it is about how JPEG and PNG store the data that makes the big jump. In the next site rewrite we are considering other storage formats, we just haven't got to that point yet.
280 JPEG to 6 Meg PNG? That's a big jump. I've never seen a PNG at 6megs. Sounds like a BMP to me. 6megs would constitute no compression.
Convert from BMP to PNG locally and try to upload the result
once you completely understand how PNG compression works in conversions like that then you would understand the jump.
Guice: Maybe I did not come across clear enough...
I converted bmp to jpg reduced file size to 280k
I upload and then view the screenshot later and its massive.
Go and look at some screen shots on this site and check the properties of the image once downloaded in the browser and you will see huge file sizes. I have uploaded png files also and it does the same on these. I am just suggesting reworking the sites code to repair the issue. I know new site code is coming soon. This is bogging the bandwidth hardcore if even 10 people are veiwing SS or theme images.
Good luck guys...
If 20 people went and looked at that image at the same time it wouldn't be bogging down our bw at all.
I read you guys can only handle 30 connections at once.
Assuming now this is a database bottleneck.
And not a network throttling issue.
we can run 20 concurrent database processes. anything more than that and they would wait 1ms for the database to be read
Well even if it's not sucking up bandwidth, it still is taking what seems to be an unnecessarily long amount of time for the user to download. So there must be some sort of logical explanation for using PNG instead of JPEG that some people, including myself, are unaware of.
This issue has already been discussed so the admins are aware a peoples opinions. I can't be bother searching for the thread. But from what I remember JPG support may come in the future. I imagine that PNG was chosen for it's quality.
Why not just fire up photoshop (or The Gimp! for a free alternative) and save the image as a PNG yourself?
Then you control filesize.
As to why; there are many advantages to a PNG, most of which is that it's an almost lossless compression. Also, it's what's used all through lightstep because it loads as fast as a bmp and it supports real transparency. :)
Try it, you might just like it instead of jpg
It was chosen for the lossless compression along with its great compression rates...however...when you have a wallpaper that has a lot of detail in it and you save it to JPG and then convert it to PNG the filesize jumps. Now if you save direct to PNG or BMP and upload the file size is somewhat normal, however still high because of the detail involved.
JackandJohn: PNG is lossless compression, no almost about it. PNG uses the same compression algorithm as zip files, which is most definatly lossless.
DeViLbOi - Agreed, the file sizes are not comparable when you are massivly compressing, however, I think the ~30% increase in filesize from a max JPG is acceptable.
I don't see the point in converting from JPG to PNG for personal use, however, unless you edit after conversion (Lossless compression of the faults in lossy compression after all ;)
iuthe - Thx for clearing that up