How many is too many? Is anyone else having these problems?

[Shian]

By no means do I have an old computer.

Dell XPS720, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU Q6850 @ 3.00GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 x2 in SLI, SATA WD RAPTOR 160GB 10K in raid 0 x2

But it's starting to bog down whenever I view threads where many users have moving gifs in their signature.

I've actually noticed a significant increase just in the last few months where it seems practically everyone on CS has at least one moving gif or banner or 12 animated stamps...
One user has 7 large ones in their sig alone plus an avatar. I also think the file sizes may have been too large for this particular user because it froze my browser for a few seconds.

By themselves it is not a problem, but when you have 5 users all doing the same thing, it does become a problem. Shouldn't there be limits? How many moving gifs is too many? Maybe it's even the total file size that is becoming a problem.

Or my computer could have something else entirely (like a virus) and no one else sees this.

[Princess Luna]

As far as loading goes, I don't have any problems (computer is a year and a half old). However, I really do think imposing a limit would be a good idea, I ended up turning signatures off entirely because I got fed up with drowning in GIF's every time I looked at a forum topic. I mean, somewhere like Tumblr you expect lots of them, but this is the only forum I'm on that seems to be overloaded with them in signatures, and I can see it being bothersome for those with slow internet.

[Shian]

I depend on signatures and avatars to identify people and I really appreciate the creativity some of them have.

That's kind of sad that the only solution to this is to turn off signatures. It's like the phrase 'some of the few ruins it for everyone else' but I guess that's the price of change.

[jasmine;]

Maybe your computer has general problems with gifs, I haven't had any problems with my computer and gifs, and my computer is quite old.

[Shian]

Nope. Yours don't slow down my computer at all. Some users and some pages do though.

[jasmine;]

I've seen quite huge gifs, I haven't had any problems. Do you have any links with the gifs that slowed your PC/computer down?

[Shian]

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1101728&start=6500
This page.

[jasmine;]

http://www.chickensmoothie.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1101728&start=6500
This page.

The first user with the frog gif is quite slow itself, not exactly slowing down the page for me, though.

I know the user with the big gifs, however I think bigger gifs might have effect on certain computers, I don't think it's because of your computer's age, though.

[| Aloy |]

Sometimes my computer slows down as well, but only on pages such as that one you linked too. I would agree with a limit on longer gifs, but I don't see how it could really be imposed. Smaller ones don't seem to be the problem. It is the extremely long ones that slow down my browser. I usually stop loading the page after a few seconds when it happens so the gifs don't load all the way, but I can still read the text.

[Takora Drakan]

There should be maybe a maximun filesize limit of gifs in your sig. The smaller ones are no problem, but the sum makes the impact. A few 20 kb gifs don't harm anyone, but if several peole have 500kb gifs in their sig, every computer will be pretty much overwhelmed because it tries to load everything at once.