I wanted to let people know that we are working very closely with our server engineer to try and optimize the downloading of the Camera to Print video tutorial.
The situation is this. There is a finite amount of bandwidth available from our server at any one time (and yes, we have maxed it out). This gets divided by the number of people doing anything on the site, from viewing pages to downloading files.
There is a very tricky balance between these activities. We have segregated the lower bandwidth requirements, such as browsing pages and viewing streaming previews, from the higher ones, such as large downloads. This allows us to provide high performance for regular site visitors, but at the expense of people doing downloads.
Long story short, we have been playing with allowable download speeds, and yesterday were running at 50kb/sec per user. This is slow, I know, but we were concerned about the balance between the number of simultaneous downloads, and throughput. We probably erred on the side of caution, a bit too much.
We have reset the system this morning (Monday) to throttle each download to 100kb/sec (twice as fast as yesterday). This is a compromise setting that should be less frustrating for users but still allow everyone who wants to to download – as long as people don't try and download more than one file at a time. One person downloading 10 files at a time is the same as 10 people downloading one file at a time. If 10 people do this (as we saw yesterday) it is the same as if 100 people were trying to do simultanious downloads.
In any event, thanks to everyone for the understanding. We have had nearly a thousand people download the tutorial since we went live over the weekend. At 2.1GB per, that's a huge bandwidth load. The server has held up, and I think we now have a better handle on managing the bandwidth requirements, just so long as people limit themselves to downloading one zip at a time. (Download the second one while watching the first. That's the idea).
Michael
