Bandwidth

[MrPeach]

I just had a little go-around with my work's network folks and Wootalizer was the cause.

They initially claimed I had a virus so I was a good doobie and scanned/ran various tools and found nothing out of order. After querying them for specifics, they said they had "detected your computer scanning thousands of systems on Internet port 80". After further prodding, they said 10608 accesses in 24 hours, then that it was to http://www.wootalyzer.com. After explaining that it wasn't a virus, they said "6 hits a second outbound is very high on a continual basis."

Does this sound right to you, or are they being nervous nellies? What kind of actual bandwidth are we talking about?

I noticed an option in the program for "low bandwidth (not recommended)" - why not recommended, and how much lower?

I'd like to keep running WA, but need a credible story to sell to IT. ^_^ Can you assist?

Thanks for a great program!

-Jack

[wootalyzer]

The current version of Wootalyzer runs of a "pull system" (aka, the software pulls an update repeatedly, and it doesn't know what happens between those updates). In order to keep alerts relatively timely, the software pulls updates once every five seconds. This way, during events such as woot-offs, you'll always get the update within five seconds of the item changing. If you only use the software casually, then Low Bandwidth mode would be perfectly fine (it pulls updates once every 30 seconds).

Regardless, it DEFINITELY doesn't pull updates 5 times a second.

In other news, the upcoming version 4 actually uses a "push system" (meaning our server "pushes" the updates directly to you). This new method doesn't have the limitations of the old system, and only uses one connection the whole time. So, you can use the Low Bandwidth mode for now, then switch to the new system when it is released.

Hope this answers your questions .