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
(
Read more... )
GreatestJournal thought this was an excellent idea! Then they discovered just how expensive large numbers of userpics were to serve (read: the cost of bandwidth and transfer made their promise of 2000 userpics utterly unfeasible to maintain for the price they were charging for *paid* accounts, let alone what money they weren't making on *free* accounts).
Basically, this will never, ever happen, but eventually, someone will come along with numerical data that reinforces what everyone is saying: "Unlimited userpics: sure, they'd be nice to have for our LJs, but not at the expense of HAVING our LJs."
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
About the only way I can see more userpics translating to a higher bandwidth cost would be if userpics were cached by browsers a large fraction of the time and if usage patterns meant that that caching was much less effective when there were more pics per user. Was that found to happen, and was it found to happen enough to make a real difference? I suppose that's possible, but it sounds far-fetched.
More userpics means more storage cost, but until I see solid evidence otherwise, I call bullshit on "it would increase bandwidth cost."
Reply
This will result in it being less likely that that particular userpic is cached, so yeah, that does raise bandwidth cost when you're operating on the scale that LJ operates on. If you can imagine someone browsing through ohnotheydidnt threads where everyone within had 1000 userpics, instead of seeing "NO U" "NO URS" "NO UR FACE" with the same userpic back and forth, imagine instead having to display a different userpic every single time in the exchange, none of which were cached, and all of which needed to be requested ( ... )
Reply
Techie nitpick/clarification: Most images actually compress *very* well, but they are already about as compressed as they can get before they're uploaded and stored on LJ (good ol' JPEG). The problem is more that if "a picture paints a thousand words", then it necessarily takes at least a thousand words' worth of storage. =:o} (Although admittedly, the average icon only paints about a hundred words... the most common words being "Look at this hot chick from my favourite fandom! (HUBBA x91)!!! ". =:o} )
Typical comment = 100 words = approx 5kB, LZ compressible to 1 or 2 kB.
Typical icon = 100x100 pixels at 3 bytes per pixel = 30kB; JPEG compressed to 6kB.
Reply
Leave a comment