Regarding Graphics During Heavy Free Republic Traffic

[I Am Not A Mod]

Hi all.

Pretty much everyone knows that things are about to get quite busy. Whenever this happens, people make suggestions such as "don't post graphics, so as to help Free Republic handle the traffic".

I wanted to be proactive and explain some misconceptions with this. For images which are not hosted by Free Republic, they do not impact on the response time for Free Republic. All our server has to produce, for a page to have a graphic on it, is a handful of characters in the form of an image tag:

<IMG SRC="http://some.url.for.the.graphic">

As such, NOT posting graphics helps Free Republic handle the load not at all. It does not take much bandwidth, at all, for the server to spit out that small amount of text.

HOWEVER, that is not all that should be said about the matter. First off, people who do post graphics should use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes when posting their images. The format of the IMG tag with these is as follows:

<IMG HEIGHT="100" WIDTH="200" SRC="http://some.url.for.the.graphic">

Where the 100 and 200 are replaced with the correct height and width (in pixels) of the image being posted. This is because many browsers, if these attributes are not included, will not load the rest of the thread until it can completely download the image, since the browser does not know how much space to leave for the image. This can cause it to appear as if Free Republic has stalled, if the server providing the image is overloaded or responding slowly. If you do use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes, the page will load normally even if the image takes a while.

Further, if you are finding that your browser is responding slowly because of images, the answer is for you to turn off the automatic loading of images within your browser preferences.

Thanks for your time.

---

[Adding a few new thoughts]

1) If you find that because of whatever reason, images are slowing down your Freeping to an unacceptable level, you should turn off the loading of graphics within your own web browser. If you don't know how, post a question here and someone will undoubtably answer (a how-to for two common browsers is listed below). Don't let the lack of a fast internet connection cause you to want to deny images to everyone else, especially when you can totally control it within your own browser.

2) That said, those who post graphics should understand that it is unrealistic to think that everyone will get the word, so overdoing the graphics is simply an invitation to tick some people off. Further, even for those who have broadband connections, and even if the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are specified on all images, a ton of graphics can cause some users' computers to slow to a crawl by using up all the available memory. Be considerate.

3) Here are instructions for how to disable the automatic loading of images (From NonValueAdded, who added value here):

To: Vol2727

In Netscape 7.0 From menu bar choose "Edit" --> "preferences", window pops up. Click on "privacy & security" then "images" choose "Do not load any images"

In Internet Explorer 6.0 From menu bar choose "Tools" --> "Internet Options", window pops up. Choose "Advanced" tab and scroll down to "Multimedia" section. Find the "Show Images" box and uncheck it.

Voila (sorry, I spoke French), enjoy your image free browsing experience while the rest of us groove on the nifty graphics.

Other browsers have similar settings.

201 posted on 03/17/2003 8:00 PM EST by NonValueAdded ("Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." GWB 9/20/01)

[FourtySeven]

Thanks. Bumping for reference. (Didn't know about the image size addition)

[Physicist]

Is this correct?

No, for that graphic you should use WIDTH=331 HEIGHT=450. When you get the original image on your browser, do right click --> properties to see the original size. If you want to resize it, stick close to the same proportions (e.g. 110 x 150).

[I Am Not A Mod]

Good post. However, if one posts using the HEIGHT and WIDTH attribute, even if the server the image is on is totally overloaded, the thread will load normally, and as such it won't kill the thread.

[Physicist]

Folks, please do not post photos from servers that are very very very slow. Threads simply will not load if your graphic freezes on loading. When you post a grahic that doesn't work, it can practicly kill a thread.

Ah, but apparently if the WIDTH and HEIGHT modifiers are used, the slow graphics will not cause the thread to freeze on loading.

[Cate]

Oh my goodness, what a cute little one. Thank you for the great 'graphic' :)

[John Robinson]

As a stopgap, the software could simply reject IMG tags without height and width modifiers, warning the user at preview time, and providing a message telling him what to do.

Indeed, it is nearly time for my yearly crucifixion.

I do plan on working out these image issues (there are others) in due time. On my list they're a mid-priority feature.

[nevergore]

Thanks!!
NeverGore

[McGruff]

Thanks for that tip, "target=blank". I didn't know how to do that.

Question, what do you use to format your thumbnail page? I could use that.

[general_re]

Can a method be devised for FR to give size modifiers to image tags automatically, if a user doesn't provide them? Of course, you wouldn't want to hardwire them, since you don't want to screw up the aspect ratios, but could the FR software someday attempt to "discover" the resource sizes at posting time?

That really would start taking bandwidth from FR - how does the server know what height and width to assign to an image without at least grabbing the image file headers? Before, when you were previewing for the first time, your browser only had to open a connection to the remote URL for the image file, and download it straight to you, without FR's server bandwidth being used at all (except for the IMG tag itself, of course), but now the server itself would also have to download the image in order to know what attributes to give it, in order to at least preserve the aspect ratio...

[Consort]

Some browsers get easily pixelated.

[js1138]

I always wondered how to control graphic size, short of resizing and re-supporting.

You are not limited to using the exact size of the original. You can make it appear smaller or larger to make the page layout look good.

[Mark Hamilton]

Lets try

[Physicist]

But it only has to grab each image headers once per image, at preview time. After that, it's hardwired into the HTML. The bandwidth overhead should be negligible.

If the image server doesn't respond in a timely manner (a few seconds, I'd say), the preview screen could just time out and give a warning message. In that case, it's probably not an image that should be posted right then anyway.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks guys. I'm suspecting some of the folks your addressing won't quite get there, but every one that does, it will help. It's a valient effort.

[Jay D. Dyson]

That really would start taking bandwidth from FR - how does the server know what height and width to assign to an image without at least grabbing the image file headers? Before, when you were previewing for the first time, your browser only had to open a connection to the remote URL for the image file, and download it straight to you, without FR's server bandwidth being used at all (except for the IMG tag itself, of course), but now the server itself would also have to download the image in order to know what attributes to give it, in order to at least preserve the aspect ratio...

Actually, that's incorrect. The FR server doesn't download the images at all. The client browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, et al) is the only thing downloading the remote images. The FR server never sees them.

The advice on including height and width attributes in the img src tags is both valid and good and should save lots of folks lots of headaches.

-Jay

[Fixit]

Great post.

• One additional trick is to use the alt tag, in the form of alt="Description of the photo" as part of the img tag.
  Alt tags allow people not loading photos, as well as blind users, to get a sense of what an image conveys.

  Example: (Hold mouse over and alt text should appear)

  

(As an aside the image above is just 837 bytes in size, stored as a .png "Portable Network Graphic" format, which often does a better job than .gif's and .jpg's at reducing image file size.)

[Brett66]

I wish the adminmods would suspend anyone from posting threads that signs up the same day or within the last couple of days, I have a feeling the trolls are ready to swamp this forum.

[Fixit]

While it does not now, if you go back and read the original post, general_re was suggesting that the FR server COULD go out and determine the image size attributes, then automatically insert the image size attributes into the html for that user's post.

Such a system would (marginally) add some bandwidth to the FR server at the time of posting, but it could serve to increase everyone elses enjoyability by easing all future downloads.

[Jay D. Dyson]

Lets try <img height=300 src="http://www.military.com/NewsContent?file=FL_inspect_031703" width=300>

Okay, first mistake. You're trying to turn an HTML page into an inline graphic. That will never work. You need to make a direct call to the remote graphic. Something like this:

<img src="http://www.9-11justice.org/images/is_it_any_wonder.jpg" height=400 width=600>

...which will give you this:

Make sense? (I mean the HTML code, not the Palestinian stupidity.)

-Jay

[MeekOneGOP]

Thanks for the heads up, RC ! And for the post, Not A Mod !

Not A Mod: I usually add the height size and often don't include the width size. From your post, then, am I to assume that having only ONE dimension slows the loading the same as NOT having ANY size specified in the graph template? . . .

In any case, my appreciation in advance for your feedback and for the opportunity to improve my posting of graphs!