Gaim killed my bandwidth.

Okay, so I volunteered to make my Gaim CVS builds for Windows available to people, and gladly so. But the past month has seen my upload bandwidth comsumption rocket to more than 17 times that of two months ago! For November (until today, 5PM UTC) that translates to 15.6GB. Just today I’ve uploaded 1GB of traffic! Something must be done!

My serverlogs tell me that almost all of this traffic is from the US, and comes from people downloading the Gaim CVS Installer which includes GTK+, gaim-2.0.0cvs-installer.exe.Ok, fine. I brought this one on myself, and I’ve now solved it myself, too. All traffic on this file will now be redirected by Apache to an identical copy that is present on my ISP’s (very limited) webspace. This will not only solve my upload traffic problem, but also give mucho improved download speeds to anyone requesting that file. The other files are presently available for download as before, since they’re not requested nearly as much.

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You’re currently reading “Gaim killed my bandwidth.,” an entry on achton.net

Published:: November 27th, 2005

Category:: Computing, Pidgin

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Hassan November 28th, 2005

lol..
You have been “gaim-cvs-ed” ( see “/.ed” )
Anyway thanks for the build.
I don’t know if people downloading exes are really intending to help debugging. But you might be able to cut the size by stripping them (I’m not sure if the makefile does strip the exe, but I’m sure the zipped CVS isn’t).

btThalion November 29th, 2005

Just want to say thanks for putting these builds up Much appreciated.

Nuage November 29th, 2005

Just here to say thanks!
For me the “bugs” of the CVS version are better than the missing feature of the 1.5. Reason why I use this CVS.

Find you through google.

Achton November 29th, 2005

Hey, thanks guys. Hope this new setup works for you.

Hassan, I might try stripping the exes, yeah – maybe that way I can cram the GTK AND noGTK installers into the 10MB of space I have at my ISP We’ll see…

Otherwise you’ll just have to put up with my own lousy upload for everything but the GTK installer.

Erik November 29th, 2005

Much appreciated! Good work!

rcas November 29th, 2005

Why not update your hosting solution, I have my website here http://www.bluehost.com/track/rcampos/gaim and it has been good so far.
Summing it up, 10GB space, 250GB transfer, might solve your problem, if you can afford the 7.95$/month.

I can provide you with 20GB transfer if you like, with limited space of 500MB. If you want it mail me.

Try getting a more decent hosting solution like the one I use http://www.bluehost.com/track/rcampos/gaim .

If you want I can give 30GB transfer and 500MB of webspace, just mail me.

Hassan November 30th, 2005

4-5 comments and BHAAM ! Guess what, your entry is hot enough to make the spammator detector goes WHIEEE..

Just wanted to remind you not to strip the files that have something to do with MSN’s SSL. Otherwise MSN will not work. I’m not sure which one really. Last time I accidentally did the wrong strip, and I just overwritten MSN files with fresh ones. You might want to do trial-and-error elimination . I would do it if my lecturers will stop bothering me with too many assignments.

Achton November 30th, 2005

- I’m not sure rcas’ comments are spam. My own crappy PHP commenting system was set to cap the comment list at 5 comments (who the heck DOES something like that?!), and I think he might have hit the Post button twice because it didn’t show up.

Anyways. Bluehost *is* really cheap. Much cheaper than here in Denmark, AFAIK.

And atm. I’m currently only stripping the gaim.exe and gaim.dll manually because I can’t figure out how to automate it for every object file (I’d rather not change the makefiles as it makes it a pain to autoupdate from CVS). I’m not doing this for the debug-build, obviously.

Lastly, I’d like to pass -g to gcc somehow for the debug build, as when I go to the about box in Gaim, it says debugging info is off. I think it may be built wrong.

.. oh well.

http://www.bluehost.com/track/rcampos/gaim
non-existent webpage makes me cruel sometimes. =P

For quick stripping, I suggest that you make a copy of Gaim debug build, and then just do ’strip ./*’ on the cloned folder. But you will have to replace those MSN’s SSL files after that though. That way you can have both gaim builds ( debug & non-debug) without recompiling.

As for the -g option, I think gaim has a DEBUG_ENABLE or similar in src or Makefile instead, to enable debug.

Lastly, I suggest that you add a non-locale version of the Gaim build. All you have to do is delete the locale folder ( which is quite big in size). I dont think many people use the locale feature. Those who want locale, can download locale. I don’t know how much stress that addition will put on your upload & storage capacity tho.

rcas November 30th, 2005

Hi, since it blocked the first post, I submitted another one with less things succeptable to be considered spam …

My msn is “msn[AT]ruicampos.com”, if you want to contact me.
I added a new subdomain on my domain, called http://gaim.ruicampos.com , should be up tomorrow or so.

And by the way, http://www.bluehost.com/track/rcampos/gaim this link is to help me get new features to my account, that is why when I state Bluehost is actually a nice hoster I put the full link, as you can see in “track” and my nick “rcampos” and the tracking id “gaim”.

I have an FTP working also for the gaim account. Once it gets up.

pete_ November 30th, 2005

I can also offer a bit Webspace for you, if needet, Traffic 2GB per Day (i use a bit of this, so you can use, lats say, 1.9 GB per day )

rcas December 1st, 2005

http://gaim.ruicampos.com is now up and working, the ftp account is also up and working for this specific subdomain.

If you want, contact me and I will give you the username and password.
If not, say so, so I can delete the subdomain and ftp account and help someone else.

Cheers.

Hassan December 1st, 2005

Sorry rcas for doubting you .
Accept my sincerest apology.

On another point, I had to do some Gaim stripping bcos of my college’s limited disk space. Thus, I was able to experiment a bit. Here’s a Makefile script for a runnable stripped Gaim:

###############################################
PARENT_OBJS = gaim.dll gaim.exe idletrack.dll libgtkspell.dll silc.dll silcclient.dll
PERLMOD_OBJS = perlmod/Gaim.dll
PLUGINS_OBJS = plugins/*

strip : $(OBJS)
strip $(PARENT_OBJS) $(PERLMOD_OBJS) $(PLUGINS_OBJS)
##############################################

And then I deleted my locale folder.
The result is, the size of the whole folder goes from a whopping 36.8 MB to 6.0 MB ( unzipped of course ).

Achton December 1st, 2005

Let me put it this way: I’m really happy that Rui really is offering gigabytes of bandwidth for this project I’m seriously considering it.

Thanks for that script, also, Hassan – I’ll look into it in a few days’ time.

repiphany December 1st, 2005

use bit torrent. not amazing d/l speeds, but if you have such a popular product, then the seed count will probably be high, and reliability isn’t a problem. this also obviously eliminates the bandwidth problem, as it’s distributed.

Nuage December 5th, 2005

And what about creating a project on “source forge”…
That contain the windows binary of gaim.

Hassan December 5th, 2005

Nope. I’m afraid that’s not what Sourceforge is for. Sourceforge is there mainly for development & collaboration between devs. The way I see it, what Geddeth is doing here is providing a variety of Gaim builds. That is, compilation and distribution of binaries. No coding involved ( except for the tiny weeny scripting ).

What we’re doing here is relieving the Gaim CVS from normal bleeding-edge users downloads. Most users don’t even care about finding bugs & writing patches. That’s what I think anyway. By routing these users to this site/mirrors, actual developers gain the CVS access speed & bandwidth they need , increasing their efficiency along the way. In other words, earlier stable builds for you and me.

On the bittorrent idea, I would support it if Gaim is >150MB after binary size optimization, and if the binary production cycle is once a fortnight. However, short production cycle ( daily CVS snapshot & compilation ) will impose trouble on downloaders. It’s likely that 20% (a guess) downloaders will experience incomplete download when the seeders skip over to the next available snapshot.

Achton December 6th, 2005

What Hassan said.

Others have written me and asked for BT distribution, but the frequent releases would leave each new torrent without seeders within a few days, which is not acceptable.

And since I have nothing to do with Gaim proper (I follow the development closely, but have not contributed anything at all), I could hardly hog any more of SF’s resources with this “project” than Gaim already does. I’m simply doing this so those of you who wish to, can have a peek at which ideas and features the developers are throwing about at the moment. Nothing more, nothing less. If the devs decide that they don’t want these builds up at any time, I’ll remove them, no questions asked. It’s their program, after all.

But I’m happy to say that the bandwidth solutions have been solved – look for increased throughput shortly!

revscott December 7th, 2005

Thanks for putting up your builds. I really appreciate it!

calleban8356 December 14th, 2005

lime wire are a great magic..
file..sharing..
only have to send
30 swedish crones
in your telephone
company..(telia in sweden)
and have whatever you want..
its so sad the best ever..
winmx 3.51 is lost..
calle in sweden
14 dec 2005

Boxy December 27th, 2005

You could always create a torrent and use Bit Torrent to share your gaim-cvs builds. It would save alot of bandwidth.

Gaim killed my bandwidth.

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