Number of Userpics

[iponeddd]

Title
Number of Userpics

Short, concise description of the idea
I feel that the number of userpics a person has should not be limited as they are with those of us who have basic and plus accounts.

Full description of the ideaI have many userpics that I would like to add to my account, but I only have a limit of 15. There should be an unlimited amount

Comments

[licon]

If you want more userpics, why not get a Paid account? That's what they're there for.

ETA: so you want something else for free, just because "something else" could be more valuable to you? Either you want them, or you don't. A paid account is not that expensive. Servers, however, are, and giving everyone many more userpics would drastically increase the server load.

[azurelunatic]

I've always heard that userpics don't take up much processor time, but do eat through bandwidth like crazy.

[licon]

You're right, my bad for trying to simplify and generalize at the same time. They do take up space too.

[jai_dit]

Yeah, although generally space is cheap and bandwidth is expensive.

[mskala]

I don't understand how more userpics per account would change the bandwidth usage at all. You still only get one per posting or comment, and that's the relevant number for bandwidth. Storage costs increase, yes, but storage is cheap. The bandwidth cost is from having userpics at all, not from how many distinct userpics there are per user.

This should not be taken (of course you wouldn't, but other readers might) as my endorsing the original suggestion. There are good objections to it. I just think the "it would cost too much EXPENSIVE BANDWIDTH" objection doesn't stand up to scrutiny. We can hypothesize some kind of cache-related difference but it's hard to believe it would be big enough to be a serious obstacle.

[azurelunatic]

I checked in with senior support, and it's both bandwidth and fun happy memcache making the site not suck like a very sucking thing. More in-depth answer to follow from senior Support.

[thewhiteowl]

An infinite number of 100x100 images is going to eat up bandwidth eventually, but memcache would be clobbered to death long, long before that. The more pics a user has, the more likely that a specific pic isn't in memcache and has to be hoiked out of storage whenever LJ needs to serve it, or at least that's my understanding.