Symphony.

I recently deleted all jpeg files in a Symphony 1.7 cache folder. In this version, caching does not work correctly as it keeps creating and storing new thumbnails of the same file.

So, around 81000 DELE commands were issued to remove all files. In this process, my FTP program hung and I restarted the program. Now, my webhost says I used almost 935.96 GB of FTP traffic (which is what DirectAdmin reports) with this operation.

My webhost send me the FTP logfile, and much more than these DELE commands can not be found. Now, is it possible that DELE creates (such a huge amount) of traffic? I find it hard to believe, and I don’t want to pay the bill for the extra traffic.

I am not a specialist in FTP protocols, but this sounds very strange to me. Deleting files shoud only create some protocol traffic. So if every DELE created 1 kB of data, you would end up with 81 MB.

935 GB for 81000 DELE commands would mean more than 11 MB per DELE command. Impossible.

Maybe the DirectAdmin guys can help?

Another idea: The logfile shows the time used to generate the traffic, doesn’t it? So if you know your bandwith, you can easily calculate that this must be an error.

Even on rather fast connections like my 25 MBit/s DSL, it would take several days (!) to download such an amount of data. (Uploading is even slower.)

(If it is shared hosting, you will not even get this bandwith for your website. If it’s an expensive server, the server connection bandwidth might be 100 MBit/s – so it could theoretically push those data out in around 20 hours.)

@carsten: no. Something has gone very wrong with your hosts reporting. Everything that michael-e says is right.

Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Ok, thanks for the confirmation. I will notify my webhost and hope that he will cooperate to find out what has caused this strange behavior in FTP traffic.