Custum Avatar Loading

[SalSar_Thiran]

How often does this board load a custum avatar from the host site? Does it load once per page or per profile update or does it call a load of the picture for every instance of it? ie. If I post 15 times in a row (one whole page) does it load the image 15 times or just once?

[Master_of_Dragons]

Hi,

the board never loads custom avatars. Your browser does that. But to answer your question: each image is loaded exactly once per page (unless you have two identical images with different filenames, of course ;)).

Master of Dragons

[Nikolai_II]

Since most browsers use caches your avatar will be loaded once or maybe twice per user reading a post that you have made.
Every time your picture gets booted from their cache by size or time their browser will then reload the picture again at their return.

If they have several computers the picture will load once per computer, etc.

[RawBearNYC]

What Nikolai said was mostly right with a few small adjustments.

Properly developed web caches will cache a copy of the file and use it every time any web page requests that file during a given session. If you close down your browser, the cache should stop doing that and the next time you come back to the site, it should ask for the image from the source again. However, there are badly developed web caches out there, and Internet Explorer's integration with Windows means that it rarely actually shuts down. And we talked about what happens with server side web caches (like the one AOL uses) on another thread.

In answer to your question, SalSar_Thiran, in a perfect world, each user that reads a thread should make exactly one request of your avatar during an online session. If they close their browser and come back hours later, then they should request a new copy.