S3 Slimdown

Sometimes the best optimizations come from asking the simplest questions. Mine was: "What are we actually paying for?"

The answer was shocking: we were storing nearly 10,000 files for a website that only needed about 500.

The Bloated Beginning

Let me set the scene. We had a fantasy website with animated characters marching across the screen - cute little sprites running from left to right in an endless parade. It worked great, looked good, and was costing us way more than it should.

The numbers told the story:

  • ~9,500 files stored in S3
  • ~100KB per file on average
  • Nearly a gigabyte of assets for one simple animation

But here's the kicker: the website only used one type of animation - the running sequence. All those other animations? Sitting there, collecting digital dust, costing us money every single month.

The "Wait a Minute" Moment

The realization hit me during a routine code review. I was looking through the JavaScript, trying to understand how the character animations worked, and noticed something peculiar. The code was loading all these different animation types - walking, running, jumping, attacking - but the website only ever showed characters running.

"Why are we storing all these animations we never use?" I thought.

That question opened Pandora's box. I started digging deeper, and the more I looked, the more wasteful it seemed. We had dozens of characters, each with multiple animation sequences, but the website only ever displayed one: running.

The Hidden Treasure

Here's where it gets interesting. Tucked away in another project folder was a goldmine - the same characters, but with optimized, normalized running animations. These weren't just smaller files; they were specifically processed for web use.

The difference was night and day:

  • Original files: ~100KB each, various formats, inconsistent naming
  • Optimized files: ~20KB each, standardized format, clean naming scheme

We had the solution sitting right under our noses the whole time.

The Great Cleanup

The optimization process was surprisingly straightforward once we knew what to look for:

  1. Audit: Identify exactly which animations the website actually used
  2. Locate: Find the optimized versions in our other project
  3. Replace: Swap out the bloated assets for the streamlined ones
  4. Deploy: Push the changes and invalidate the cache

The result? We went from ~9,500 files to ~500 files. That's not a typo - we eliminated 95% of our storage while keeping the exact same functionality.

The Numbers That Matter

Let's talk about the impact:

Before:

  • ~9,500 files at ~100KB each = ~950MB total
  • Complex file structure with multiple animation types
  • Slower loading times due to larger assets

After:

  • ~500 files at ~20KB each = ~10MB total
  • Clean structure with only necessary animations
  • Faster loading with smaller, optimized assets

We reduced our storage by 95% while maintaining identical functionality. The website looks exactly the same, works exactly the same, but now costs a fraction of what it did before.

The Bigger Lesson

This experience taught me something important about cloud costs: they creep up on you.

When you're building something, you're focused on functionality. "Does it work? Great, ship it." But you rarely go back and ask, "Are we being efficient?"

Cloud storage feels cheap when you're dealing with individual files, but multiply that by thousands of files across multiple projects, and suddenly you're looking at serious monthly bills.

The real lesson here is about intentional architecture. Every file you store, every asset you include, should have a purpose. If it doesn't serve the user experience, it's just costing you money.

The Victory Lap

What I love about this optimization is that it's completely invisible to users. The website works exactly the same - same characters, same animations, same experience. But behind the scenes, we're running lean and mean.

This isn't just about saving money (though that's nice). It's about building efficiently. It's about being thoughtful about what we ship and how we ship it.

And honestly? There's something deeply satisfying about looking at your cloud bill and seeing it drop by 95% while your users don't notice a single difference.

That's not just good engineering - that's smart engineering.