Sunset Grill: Home -> Anime Image Archives

The following is an important message regarding services around here. Please, read this in it's entirety. Yes, you, too. I know, you've been doing this as long as the archive's been up. You should read it too.

Recently - over the past few days, in fact - you've probably noticed something: it's a little slower around here. There's good reason, I suppose.

Allow me to explain.

Since I started this archive in 1999, it has increased in popularity by orders of magnitude, which to me is entirely unexpected. To be honest, I originally created this to just have a place to look at my stuff, which was then only a couple hundred images. Since then, I've watched as I've uploaded almost two gigabytes of images up here, and with that has come a sagan links, bots trawling the archive, people referring to this for their anime fix, a myriad of viewers telling me where the unsorted stuff belongs, and even at one point, a number one rank on google for when somebody searches for 'anime images'. (We are currently number three.) On average, there are three hundred unique visitors hitting this page per day. Today's load is a bit high - at this second, there have been 406 unique visitors, and at the rate things are going, there will be more.

To explain what's going on with the speed though, a side effect of this popularity is simple - there are literally gigabytes of data flowing off of this server per day. The log files are unviewable without isolating them because the log data scrolls by on the screen too fast to be read. On top of this, there is the unfortunate issue of users hotlinking to images on the gallery from one location or another - this is almost impossible to detect, yet compounds to the problem, increasing bandwidth usage by an order of magnitude. Overall, there have been peaks of 4 megabits per second, and generally speaking, there has been a constant stream of data flying out of here at any given moment.

Unfortunately, this means that the site admin here has had to constrict bandwidth. While we are incredibly lucky in that we don't have to pay for excessive bandwidth usage, we still have an obligation to actually be nice to the provider. The other option is that I set up hosting on another location, which at this time I am unable to afford. (Speakeasy Networks, my ISP of choice, offers a limitless-bandwidth package - but it costs another $25/mo, plus a setup fee, atop the $120/mo I'm already paying them to have DSL and VOIP service in such a way that I don't require a telco line and can host my other servers. That, and I'm moving - now is not the time to ask them to do this.)

So it all boils down to a few things.

One, we are NOT going anywhere at this time, nor do we expect to be. I just can't afford to do the hosting, and the admins have no problem as long as the bandwidth can be kept down to a dull roar.

Two, this will remain entirely free and without adverts - again, for now. If this does move, however, I'll put up a tip jar. If I have to go with advertisements, I'll stick with the Google Words ads and try and tweak them to eliminate porn.

Finally - and this is where I'm going to come off sounding like a jerk - the hotlinking needs to stop. Period. There's no excuse other than plain laziness to hotlink images. There are means for hosting background images, user icons, and the like tha distribute the consumption more evenly across the internet, and if you're really worried about consuming your own bandwidth (Geocities users come to mind here), there are ways to decrease the size of the image without losing any visible quality. Please, PLEASE, copy the image from here and find space for it somewhere else!

(A special note to those on alt.binaries.pictures.anime: like the blurb below suggests, the vast majority of these images come from the group. I don't mind you pulling from here and posting there - I'll do that occasionally - but bear in mind the source of the images.)

All this said, please, feel free to otherwise continue to use this. I've put it up for you to view, peruse, pick and choose, and have made every effort to keep it from being pornographic, and such like that - so I really don't mind if you keep viewing the site. (If I did mind, I'd never put it up here.) Just expect it to be kinda slow until we can get this under control.

If you want to know how to help, all I ask is that if you're hotlinking, as I stated above, please stop, and move the image to your own site.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks for your understanding.

-Dennis
April 20, 2006@19:34 PST

Future plans may include offering the remains of the venice archive - the scripts, sound files, etc., etc., ad nauseam. It isn't so much the layout, it's more the plan of attack that's daunting.

For the pages here, note the thumbnails might be elongated, pixellated, mosaic-looking, or otherwise distorted. Odds are pretty good that for these cases, the image will be better looking than the thumbnail. Also, be thou warned - many images in here are rather large, and some of these pages can take a few minutes to load. I have done my best to make sure things load as fast as possible, but it's something to keep in mind. Be noted too that there are duplicate images in here. Hard drives are great for storing all this stuff at once, but not human brains.

Lastly, I would be very grateful if you could tell me what images belong where in the unsorted directory - or for that matter, any corrections you see as necessary on this page. Please, provide all available details (image filename, directory where it resides, where it should go, what link is missing, etc.) and email me with all the pertinent information - but please make sure you put some indicator that it's regarding the image gallery. =^^=