Palm banner ad: WARNING!
Just checked Internet Explorer's 'temp files' folder to grab a nice piece of Flash animation from a site.
What do I find?
Just under 3000 (4kb) gif files taking up 11.5MB of my hard disc. All called from the "PalmOne" banner ad on Appleinsider's forum page. I had left a page open in the background for a couple of hours.
I just watched, bemused, as the folder grew......24 files a second!
I am no expert in the most recent versions of Flash, but this can't be right....can it?
If I hadn't noticed before going to bed I reckon There would be nearly 15000 files by the morning, taking up over 50 MB of space!
Can someone at Appleinsider have a word with the advertisers?
What do I find?
Just under 3000 (4kb) gif files taking up 11.5MB of my hard disc. All called from the "PalmOne" banner ad on Appleinsider's forum page. I had left a page open in the background for a couple of hours.
I just watched, bemused, as the folder grew......24 files a second!
I am no expert in the most recent versions of Flash, but this can't be right....can it?
If I hadn't noticed before going to bed I reckon There would be nearly 15000 files by the morning, taking up over 50 MB of space!
Can someone at Appleinsider have a word with the advertisers?
Comments
Originally posted by piot
Can someone at Appleinsider have a word with the advertisers?
Thread of the year, dude.
I'd explain it better, but I'm busy cleaning a rye and coke off my goddamn display. It was worth it though. Nothing like a good laugh to clean out the sinuses.
However could anyone at least explain to me if this is the correct behaviour for a Flash file?
ie. The file loads a couple of gif images every few seconds or so....and then repeats the process over and over. However these image files end up with sequentially generated unique file names, so you end up with an ever expanding temp files folder.
Anybody got a REAL answer?
Piot
he's the only one who can fix them.
Originally posted by alcimedes
send an e-mail off to [email protected]
he's the only one who can fix them.
Thank you!
what
Originally posted by segovius
OK guys! Seeing as this thread is only of interest to me, and so far nobody (apart from alcimedes) has anything constructive to add....why don't you lay off all the lame utterences?
Originally posted by piot
OK guys! Seeing as this thread is only of interest to me, and so far nobody (apart from alcimedes) has anything constructive to add....why don't you lay off all the lame utterences?
Many Mac Explorers prefer to Safari with their PithHelmet on.
Annoying ads get blocked... user control more than advertiser control.
Safari's Debug menu also offers options to tweak your cache settings,
and you can force clear your cache more frequently than the default, which might also serve to limit the overflow on your end.
You might also have success by adding the offending palm url to your /etc/hosts config file.
If you're not capable of Safari, or your site insists you accept ads and discourages blockers (like ARS), your only real option is to complain to the administrators who handle adserving... hence the email above.
hope this helps (and doesn't get censored)
No Safari on this old G4 at the moment. Still on 8.6!
I am aware that there are things I could do to remedy the situation however I am also curious about why this is happening in the first place. I have never seen another ad work like this.
I use Flash quite alot...and when I upgrade I don't want to be producing work that annoys (too much) my client's customers.
Piot
Originally posted by piot
Thanks curiousuburb.
No Safari on this old G4 at the moment. Still on 8.6!
I am aware that there are things I could do to remedy the situation however I am also curious about why this is happening in the first place. I have never seen another ad work like this.
I use Flash quite alot...and when I upgrade I don't want to be producing work that annoys (too much) my client's customers.
Piot
ahhh <rummages in memory>
IIRC, some system 8 browsers and some versions of the flash plugin were notorious for not cleaning up after themselves. As I recall it was part of a buffer overflow problem which could bork machines by overloading their cache in just the manner you describe. Seems to me the first version of the Flash video codec had a similar issue in its initial build.
This may be specific to the plugin/browser version you're dealing with.
Download one of the Netscape or Mozilla builds and see if that's a workaround, or perhaps post in one of the news.macromedia.flash groups to see if their gurus go back that far
Alternate testing might be obtained if you've got a standalone flash player that can load the url of the ad in question and then check to see if your cache gets overloaded. If you've examined the HTML of the offending page and don't see an excessive refresh of the banner (suspecting the ad code itself) then eliminating the browser from the equation might help you determine if the issue persists (in addition to trying other browsers for differing compatibility with the plugin).