animated gifs - impact on httpd access.log

[Bill Crosbie]

At 03:53 PM 11/12/96 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Web server administration question to those who allow,
>or intentionally include (you should all be striken
>by lightening...but that's another issue), 
>animated gifs on their server(s).
>
>When these push/pull animations skew your
>web server access log beyong all meaningful
>recoginition, do you:
>
>a). Pre-process OUT the extraneuous hits the aninmated
>    gifs in question create?  A single gifs caused over
>    15,000 hits on our server in one month. 
>
>b). Disallow inclusion of said band-width wasting, content
>    free, distractions from your server(s).
>
>c). Just leave the hits in there?  


Rod,

I think you are confusing an animated gif with a server push animation.  

An animated gif89a is a single file with multiple images which is
interpreted locally by the browser.  It is a single file in your server logs.

With a server push animation it is, believe it or not, still a single hit to
the server.  The beauty (and curse) of server push is that the connection is
maintained  for the duration of the transmission.  The MIME type is
multipart/mixed (I believe...) and that means that the browser must maintain
a connection to the server, instead of dropping the connection.  Etiher way
there is a single connection in both instances.  The gif89a causes less
strain on the server.  I refuse to comment on what I believe they do to the
end user.

Bill
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