Excessive RAM useage?

Hi wadams92101,
I own a number of websites and those stats do seem high for such a small amount of traffic (I’m assuming you meant that the total bandwidth is 800-900 MB per month, yes??), as 5,000 hits a month is very low – are you sure it’s “hits” and not the (total) “visits” or the “unique visitors” stats?. I can give you some idea of bandwidth usage by the following stats – they’re for a site that I just launched 5-6 weeks ago (and yeah, it’s going “gang-busters” / very well – and no marketing or advertising involved either, just my SEO work ?? …). The site’s first full month (February 2012) stats were:

Unique Visitors: 2,116
Number of visits: 3,588
Hits: 36,892
Bandwidth: 623.61 MB (note that this is much higher than it would be normally due to the setting up of the site & adding all the articles & images etc, including Amazon products & images etc. I’d expect it to be maybe only 2/3 or even half of that normally).

I think I might have some suggestions for you to lower your bandwidth usage – #1: OPTIMIZE YOUR IMAGES! (….as my eyes nearly popped right out of my head when I read “but images are generally under 1MB” – my God, I could probably fit 300 of my images in that!! lol – I try to keep my images to around or under 35 KB if possible, and 100 KB for me would be a big amount…. my images are not grainy or crappy either, by the way! – but I optimize them in photoshop before I even upload them to my sites. There’s a great little setting / option in Photoshop “Save for Web” which shrinks them even smaller than if you just save them normally…. obviously you should also reduce the dimensions of your images too, as you don’t need an image that’s say 1200×1900 pixels, so reduce it to say 500×700 or less etc and then save it via the “save for web” option & voila!, it’ll be tiny compared to before…. Another suggestion is to also install a cache plugin (I use WP Super Cache, as it’s nice and easy to set up & so far has been trouble-free / hasn’t crashed the sites like another cache plugin did….).
I hope this helps you, good luck – Regards, Karen

Thank you so much Karban! Actually, I confused visits with hits. I get about 5,000 visits, and 3,000 unique visitors. I’ll bet its the image sizes. I already use wp-super cache but was doing all my image size reducing via reducing the dimensions. I’ll have to use that photo shop feature for sure. Do you know of a plugin that can reduce or compress images that already uploaded? Or should I just leave alone the existing images?

I already use wp-super cache but was doing all my image size reducing via reducing the dimensions.

Ouch. Yeah, you need to actually resize them. When you upload an image, WP generates multiple versions (thumbnail, medium, large and original). You should use the ‘right’ version for each page.

Thank you Ipstenu. This could be tough to manage since I have 100 + authors uploading and submitting articles. Anyway to automate it? E.g., plugin?

I found a plugin called wp smush.it that does some bulk compression of already uploaded images, and I manually compressed some of the stuff on my front page. Am I right in understanding that if an image is in old archived post and no one is visiting it, it doesn’t effect my RAM?

If an image isn’t being accessed, it would affect RAM.

I use smush.it on my busy server to help out, it works well. https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

Though … I think we’re not talking about the same thing with ‘resizing’. Are your authors putting the image, in it’s full size, in every post?

If an image isn’t being accessed, it would affect RAM.

I take it you meant “would not,” rather than “woluld”? In answer to your question, yes most are uploading at a pretty full size, albeit under 2 MB

Erf. Would not.

Okay, there are two kinds of ‘size’ here ?? One is file size (2MB), and the OTHER is image size (400×600 for example).

In this case, ONE issue is that authors are uploading large images. The other is that, as you said, you’re doing:

all my image size reducing via reducing the dimensions.

I’m a little curious to know what that means. If you mean ‘The users upload image foobar.jpg, which is 2MB, and the dimensions are 5000×2000, and when I include it in my theme, I just resize that via <img src="/foobar.jpg" width="500" /> and call it a day.’ Then you have a SECOND problem.

So can you elaborate on what you mean by ‘reducing the dimension’?

I just resize that via <img src=”/foobar.jpg” width=”500″ /> and call it a day.

Yes I think I do that. I use the toolbar in the post edit window to resize it.

BTW, I spent a good portion of yesterday manually replacing images with smaller kb images and also using smush.it bulk compression and it didn’t seem to have much effect on RAM useage.

Yeah, smush.it will help a LITTLE, but since you’re ‘doing it wrong’ when you’re resizing, it won’t help ‘enough.’

Okay. When you upload an image, you know how it gives you different sizes? Small, medium, large and full? You need to stop picking ‘full’ and resizing like that. You should use the smaller images listed there. They’re separate images, resized physically (what you’re doing is dynamically), and will use less RAM.

Thanks Ipstenu. If I pick a smaller image upon inserting it, then it won’t fill out my Dynamic Content Gallery Slider widget, no?

BTW, what about those plugins recommended in WP-Super Cache, like Minify – do you use any of those? Which is the most bang for the buck?

I know sod all about that widgets.

I use W3 Total Cache, which also minifies, but minification doesn’t affect images.

…..a nice easy way around your problem might be to just simply limit the allowed file size for all your uploads…. (then they’ll have to do all the work for you!! he he he…). And if you needed to upload a large file occasionally you could always upload it via CPanel / FTP…

If you are using a membership plugin then it might have some controls within it’s settings for limiting file uploads…. (the S2 Member plugin is very good btw – and it probably does have that ability however I haven’t looked as I haven’t needed it). Also, you can find free online equivalents / copies of Photoshop (& I’d refer your authors to them if I were you, then your authors will have no excuse…) ??

I will use a larger, but still optimized image for my posts which are going to be featured on front-page sliders, and then smaller images for all the rest. If you use a image that’s smaller than the slider dimensions it’ll usually look fuzzy or grainy….

There’s nothing right now that limits thge upload size of individual files per user :/