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Banner questions
I'm having trouble getting on the Adcycle website to find out more about the banner plug-in that's been released, but I thought I could still get some opinions here.

My main concern about banners is the speed and load on my server. How processor intensive is the banner plug-in and will it slow down the loading of my pages on average?

My needs are pretty simple, probably no more than two dozen ads. The reason I ask, is that I've been to many popular sites and have had to wait for the banner to load before the rest of the site loads. I plan on promoting my site as a very fast, easy-to-use search system and I want to be careful to not add anything that will slow it down.

Is the adcycle program the fastest way to display banner ads? And if not, what would the fastest system be to display rotating banner ads? I've seen some programs that are available in C, and they claim that it is faster than Perl.

Or, am I overeacting with such a small number of ads? Does the number of ads make any difference at all, or is it related more to the number of viewers seeing the pages? MySql runs pretty fast on my server, so if this plug-in is using that will that make it run fast also?

Thanks,

Bryan

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Re: Banner questions In reply to
The number of ads will only make a minimal difference. Ads normally slow down pages not necessarily because the script is taking time but because the image is being called from a remote place (a banner network) and thus is slower to reach you (if there is a bad connection) than the html from the site.

If you need banners (which will allows slow down a site) then adcycle does look like a good option but i would like to see some stats of some stress testing with links really.

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Hi,

Total number of ads is not important (as it's all stored in MySQL and indexed properly), however what is important is number of simultaneous requests. i.e. how many hits per seconds your site is getting.

If you are a low to medium traffic site getting less then 2 hits per second (translates to roughly 5 million hits a month), then perl cgi will be acceptable.

If you are a high traffic site, then you may want to look at mod_perl instead. Also, AdCycle comes with an adcycle daemon and a C program to speed up adserving as well. Either of these will help improve performance under heavy loads.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Hi Alex,

Is it possible to tell the software to only put banners under certain categories and only display under certain categories?

If not can anyone suggest software which can do this?



Regards

MDJ1
http://www.isee-multimedia.co.uk
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Hi,

To do this would mean:

1. Add a column called DisplayBanner to the category table and make it a Yes No field.
2. Edit your category.html template with:

<%if DisplayBanner eq 'Yes'%>
<%Plugins::Adcycle::display_banner%>
<%enidf%>

Would do the trick.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Alex,

I use adcycle more than one year. I like your idea to integrate wwwthreads, links and adcyle because these are the programs I like to use.

I have frequently trouble with adcycle, because it seems to use a lot of cpu at my server (olm.net).

Actually this days again I got email from olm that they want disable the script if it will still crashes the server (or mysql, not sure).
I donīt know if they can be exactly detect that my script makes the trouble, they have so many domains on each server.

I think at this point there should be a good offer for a dedicated server where user can run the combination of links-adcycle-wwwthreads once they have a popular project.

I remember that you mentioned something like that, but did not find details.

By the way, it should be cheap :) (or better, NOT EXPENSIV)

Michael



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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Hi,

Are you using the new version 1.14? or the old one 0.79? The new one is significantly better.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
I started with 0.7xx
now I have 1.13

From the first day I was very satisfied about possibilities of the scripts, admin functions, installation, layout, everything ist very good. I did not see any other ad-script like this. I still think that itīs the best!

Iīm just afraid about the provider-trouble.

I think I serve 40.000 ads a day, should not be to much.

Michael

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Re: Banner questions In reply to
40,000 a day should be ok, but it depends on your peaks. If you often have heavy traffic at ceartain times, then you could be doing 10-15 hits per second to your banner script, this can quickly overload a virtual server.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Ok,

they offer mod_perl and daemon
I donīt know if i can use this at olm.net
but if i understand the postings at adcycle forum
right, itīs not easy ...

what about dedicated servers for reasonable prices??
Do you have a reference for that?

Michael

P.S. Itīs frustrating to insert the ad-code at a lot of sites and need to remove them in case of trouble. Ad-customers also donīt smile about broken adimages ...

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Re: Banner questions In reply to
In Reply To:
I donīt know if i can use this at olm.net
but if i understand the postings at adcycle forum
right, itīs not easy ...
It is actually very easy. I setup adcycle using the daemon method at perlmad.com just to try it out and they have simple instructions on the adcycle website about how to do it which should be no problem if you have telnet/ssh access.

Basically it just involves compiling the code and starting the daemon. The instruction tell you everything you need to know.

It is obviously easier on a dedicated server as you have more control but there should be no problem running the daemon on a vhost - you will just have to make sure it is started everytime your host restarts their server - (they may not appreciate a daemon running without permission though).

Paul Wilson.
http://www.wiredon.net/gt/
http://www.perlmad.com/
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Today I tried to install Daemon, without success.
Maybe they have restrictions at olm.

You are right, the instructions are not very complicated and during installation everything looks running fine, but finally when I checked the result I saw that it crashed mysql (wwwthreads was also down).

Iīm not familiar with such installations and went back to run adcycle with standard configuration, to avoid more trouble with olm.net because they have an eye on my adserver.

Yesterday they told me to disable cgi at my domain if my script continue crashes the server.

A few weeks ago I changed from 1 banner 468x60 to 2 banner 230x60 on each site, probably thatīs to much for the script (or the server).

Last year I had the same situation with version 0.79, after changing to 2 banner on each site, trouble started.

There are some threads at adcycle board (also in the old board, the messages does no longer exist) about crashing the server (some of them seem to be dedicated server).

I would be interested to know whatīs bad.
The script or the servers?

Michael




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Re: Banner questions In reply to
They are not joking at olm ....

Today they disabled mysql at my adserver because of heavy usage from adcycle.

They told me "Itīs not the software, itīs to much traffic".

I would be interested to know if there is someone around her who runs adcycle more than some weeks and can tell something about number of banner-impressions each day and if he has problems which I have, or not.

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Re: Banner questions In reply to
sounds like new need a dedicated server.

Check out:

www.dialtoneinternet.net
www.venturesonline.com
www.rackspace.com

for what i think are the best 3. I am at dialtoneinternet but would like to move to venturesonline if i get some more money.

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Banner questions In reply to
Thanks padders,

venturesonline.com seems to have a good offer.

In Germany traffic is very expensive. 50GB would cost more than 600$ (including Hardware), or they have 24month contracts, only one IP-address and such jokes ...

About adcycle,

Nobody should think that I donīt like this programm, see my other postings, but yesterday I contacted someone who also posted problems at the board.

He told me that they did run it with success, but after some times trouble came up, they moved to dedicated server and started new, again it was ok. After 6 weeks, trouble came back. Every 10 minutes mysql was down. They no longer use it now.

Iīm a little bit disappointed, because the programm has such good features, but now I have the situation that I have a lot of broken images at a lot of sites. Removing the codes would take so many hours .....

Michael