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I am working on an android app in which i am including an image gallery. The images will be stored on Webserver and will be accessible by app. I want to know that if I only store images on webserver and 1 webpage. Will the Hotlinking of images from server in my app, affect CPU usage on webservers? Any help will be appreciated.

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2 Answers 2

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The host that is serving the image will consume resources every time that image is accessed, so for example:

App.com has HTML page image.com has the images, every time that app.com is accessed resources are used on app.com to serve the HTML and image.com server will consume resources serving the images. So, yes CPU/RAM is used.

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Can you suggest any free image host with wide bandwidth and a static url to your image directory? –  ashu Jun 8 '13 at 16:49
    
Sorry don't know any, I personally keep away from services that are free because there's always hidden restrictions and creates more work later on - I'm sure there are plenty, check Google ;) –  bybe♦ Jun 8 '13 at 16:55
    
okay! Thanks for your help. –  ashu Jun 8 '13 at 16:57
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Because images are typically static they often don't strain resources the same way that dynamic pages do. Dynamic pages typically put strain on:

  • The CPU
  • The Database

Images typically strain

  • Number of simultaneous requests
  • Disk IO
  • Bandwidth

It is likely that you can serve a fair number of image requests from your server without bogging it down.

If the images are making your server slow, the typical way to deal with them is to

  • Optimize them with image shrinking programs
  • Serve images that are the correct size to display in the browser rather serving large ones that are scaled down at the user end
  • Combine many images into one (spriting)
  • Move them to a content delivery network (CDN)

See Yahoo's guide for speeding up your website which has good explanations on all of those items.

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I have tried it once on free hosting. My host was serving some data from webpages to my android app. I got 6000 downloads in two days. my site was down for 24 hrs. in 48hrs.. Means that my app was also not fuctioning properly. At the other side, i don't want to invest money on VPS hosting and all. I am searching for some good free image host with static url to image directory. –  ashu Jun 8 '13 at 18:06
2  
@Ashutosh you can't expect to get everything for free. CDNs are not expensive. If you have a lot of usage for your app you should be receiving some form of income from that. –  DisgruntledGoat Jun 8 '13 at 19:19
    
To be honest hosting is just as important as the functionality of the app, if app gets 3,000 downloads per a day it should be pretty easy to get funding for some decent hosting that is not expensive as @DisgruntledGoat has suggested. –  bybe♦ Jun 8 '13 at 22:37
    
okay! thanks for help. –  ashu Jun 9 '13 at 2:48

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