On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 11:22:57AM -0400, Beartooth wrote: > I've always excluded pix from the lists I run manually... > > Are there any rules of thumb from people's experience as to > how much more bandwidth a list carrying pix eats, as compared to > one that excludes them?
I can offer a small anecdotal data point: I run a medium-sized (I suppose) list, about 2K subscribers, maybe 100 of which actively post, maybe 10-40 total articles/day. I allow gif images, but not jpgs, as gifs are a lot more efficient for the charts that are appropriate for this list. However, I restrict the article size, including all attachments, to 15K, so they have to make that chart really count! My list gets relatively few images, maybe one every 3-4 days. I don't allow html at all. I'm a member of another list devoted to the same topic that allows unlimited posting of anything, html, you-name-it. Some of the jpg charts on that list (that should have been gifs) can run to 400K, and I simply remove them at my ISP so they don't clog my fetchmail queue. I also strip the html off that list as I retrieve it. Even with my various prunings, and the fact that I tend to keep most of the content from my own list (for no good reason :), I find there's at least ten times the bandwidth on the unlimited list. I should mention that that other big list is quite well regulated, on-topic, etc. The posts tend to run: someone posts a chart and some discussion of it, then ten others chime in with text-only posts. Neither list is a "pix" list per se; it's just that often a chart is useful to help make the author's point. Pix are large... :) Jim
