How much minimum bandwidth does CPG need?

[majay]

Hi, this question may sound weird, but I'm looking for a webhost for my gallery which will contain about 14 000 pictures (about 900MB), and I want to calculate how much bandwidth I will need for it. Had it all been in HTML I would have been able to do that myself, but I really have no clue of the size of a PHP page and of how much bandwidth this kind of PHP script uses per page loaded, without pictures on it.
I'm sorry I'm a bit (a lot) of a beginner...
Thanks for your help.

[donnoman]

That's going to be a hard question to answer, because the answer changes depending on which theme you are using.

Some themes are "heavier" than others, and it depends on if you are going to allow users to switch themes.

PHP vs HTM in regards to traffic: Makes absolutely no difference. Whether you coded the page in straight HTML or you told PHP to output it, the wieght of the resulting HTML is the same. HTML is HTML after all. An HTML paged coded with as much detail as Coppermine's PHP script outputs would take the same amount of time to download.

NOW that being said: your real worry with a PHP based script vs static HTML is PHP is processor intensive and as your number of concurrent users goes up the server will be taxed more. Your CPU will probably be the bottlneck before bandwidth is. Coppermine doesn't take a lot of horsepower to serve pages, it's stressed most when doing batch adds of pictures that need resizing.

Now if your worried about pocket book. Well that will be directly related to how popular your gallery is. If it gets slashdotted your screwed.  

[majay]

Thank you very much for that explanation! But I will use the "hardwired" theme and will disable theme switching, aswell as intermediate pictures.

[Tranz]

I would think that intermediate pictures would save bandwidth since they would be smaller than the full size photos...

[donnoman]

Rereading the posts, part of my original message was cut-off.

I actually posted some sizes of transfers for classic, so I'll repeat them to the best of my recollection.

With the verision in development and the classic theme, I think my main page was at about 190K. that is with 8 alb/cat thumbnails, two  rows of random and last updated thumbnails each.

I also tested Rainy Day, which is one of the heavier themes, and it came in just a hair over 200K.  Hardwired would come somewhere  between them.

I've seen users sites with the front page modded, and alb/cat thumbnails turned off, no random or last update, come in at around 50K for their main page.

but the whole thing about bandwidth is, its all based on how many people hit your site. If you have 14,000 images of sewage workers cleaning drains, your probably not going to have much bandwidth usage.  On the other hand if you post 14,000 racey wallpapers you'll probably go broke.

Size your bandwidth to your audience and your budget, not the size of your content.

[donnoman]

I would agree with TransNDance. Intermediate pictures will use more diskspace but will save you on bandwidth.

An intermediate picture might be 400k while the full size could be 2-4mb. If the user figures out from the intermediate, that this picture doesn't require a closer look you've saved a bundle of traffic.

[majay]

Thanks for all the advice! I'll have to see if I should have intermediate pics or not, because my full size pics aren't really big anyway (I don't think they exceed 300k, most of them being <100k), I've already disabled everything apart from viewing the albums and searching the gallery, I'll probably also take the main page's thumbnails off, too. The problem is that right now I can't quite tell what kind of audience my gallery will have. I think I'll be starting off at 30GB transfer, and I'll see how it goes. Thanks again, you were very helpful!