As you can see from the below chart, we've had a sudden drop in bandwidth usage which is strange because site traffic hasn't dropped at all, in fact it has gone up.

I doubt anyone would know but would anyone have any ideas as to why the drop in bandwidth? Have any users complained about games suddenly not working lately? My only conclusion is that a site might have been hotlinking files on vizzed and suddenly stopped. Either way it's a huge drop and if it's not affecting anyone in a bad way than I like the drop because it can reduce server costs in the long run.


JigSaw : What do you think of this?






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That is odd considering we broke traffic records for those lowest days lol. A few things come to mind...

1) Photos being hotlinked doesn't make much sense because I thought that no one could use pictures from vizzed, or is that GYR only?

2) Could be possible some search engines stopped scanning vizzed. Not talking about google but the less known ones.

3) I looked up pageviews and that does not appear to be a factor since Feb 1st had low amount of page views but really high bandwidth usage compared to Feb 5th which is when we got the highest amount of traffic ever along with the lowest bandwidth in the chart you posted.

Mabye not as many people played games those days? Or some of the games are broken. Probably one of those two.

JigSaw : I'm talking about the RGR game files, I've always had a suspicion that a website out there might be allowing users to download roms but using my rom links as their downloads.

I'm pretty much clueless towards the way your site is run or any site--I'm not that computer savvy--but would this relate to games suddenly not working which previously did? I've experienced that on a few occasions myself, as well as an answer to a complaint sent to RGR Staff.

That's insane... maybe the chart is broken or something? Because really, I know that the Vizzed users are consuming more then that. From the looks of it it's maybe 1 or 2 gigs a day, which with all of the activity in the RGR and all, should be consumed in a half an hour. So really this makes no sense.

the_casualty : Actually we average 175 GB a day but the past 3 days has been around 95 GB a day.

Oh wait... crap. D: I need moar sleep. I was reading the wrong thing, I was reading ahead... I thought thats what you meant by the drop. I think maybe the bandwidth changes may have to do slightly with the chat rooms, I mean in the beginning of Feb. we were getting like 20-30 people in there at a time, but now we're getting like 7 or so. With all of the pictures and files being posted that could easily eat up a lot of bandwidth.

the_casualty : Only files can use up that much bandwidth, the chat room I'd imagine uses up only a few GB a month.

I don't know what happened, but this sudden drop in bandwidth cut off my access to the website as I as preparing a post. I could hit the back button to bring up the previous page I was on, but could not go forward anywhere. I also tried exiting my web browser then logging back on, but had no success coming to Vizzed. This unusual activity must have affected the entire website and not just one area. All this happened around midnight EST on 02/08/11. I hope this info helps.

David, could it be the file uploads in chat? lot of people upload pointless pictures in chat, so that could be the cause?

Well it just went back to normal as of yesterday.

legacyme3 : Nope would have nothing to do with those.

Maybe people just stopped playing games for a while, or something like that.

Davideo7 : This may help. I've had a SQL server error or two for 4-5 minutes a few days ago. I don't get it anymore, but it may have had something to do with this.

Check this out, another drop in bandwidth. I'm surprised to see a Saturday so low, especially since it was the most traffic vizzed has ever received in a single day. The only trend I can see is that the more traffic vizzed gets, the more the bandwidth usage drops, might just be a coincidence though but Friday, Saturday and Sunday seem to be when the drops take place.







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Maybe some other site is linking to the vizzed ROMs, but the users from those sites have started to find their way here instead, which is causing the increase in traffic and decrease in bandwidth? Probably not likely though, if it even works like that.

I've been getting some RGR inbox complaints about games just suddenly not working for people, and some people who can't download games when they play them for the first time. Maybe this is happening to a lot of people, but only a few are reporting it? Is the biggest bandwidth use when players play the game for the first time, or is the use constant when playing that same game subsequent times?



Edit/Update: A user posted the following in a thread, which confirms that some people aren't able to download from the site right now:

i have tried uninstall/ reinstall the programs and its kinda weird i can use games from before this started effecting me now any games i try to get wont work. and it effects me daily not just on weekends all the games i currently own i can play but no new games i find

So people are posting it in threads, and sending it in to the RGR inbox. Is something broken, so that maybe certain regions or ISPs can't access vizzed? It's working fine for me though, so whatever it is isn't affecting everyone.