Traffic data? Just curious

April 27, 2004 6:28 PM

An interesting #mefi-debate prompts the following question: what is the average monthly traffic moved by MeFi/MeTa/AskMe every month? Any outstanding recent monthly highs/lows?
posted by Ryvar to MetaFilter-Related at 6:28 PM (33 comments total)

I wasn't sure if this was more appropriate in AskMe or MeTa, but it seemed Metafilter-related, so here it is. My guess was aggregate bandwidth usage totals 50-100GB/month.
posted by Ryvar at 6:30 PM on April 27, 2004

It's just text tho--would it be that high?
posted by amberglow at 6:53 PM on April 27, 2004

amberglow: my old almost-pure-text site got 5-10GB of traffic a month. Based on the higher userbase, and higher activity per user rate, I'm guessing it's about an order of magnitude more traffic.
posted by Ryvar at 7:07 PM on April 27, 2004

MonkeyFilter gets about 4GB per month at the moment with maybe 200 pretty active members and another 150-ish not-so-active members. I'm thinking Ryvar's close.

I shudder to think what the traffic peaked at during the open registration at the start of this month.
posted by tracicle at 7:12 PM on April 27, 2004

The last time I checked it was around 300Gb a month. I'll run some stats later tonight to see what it is currently.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:55 PM on April 27, 2004

Um, wow. Color me impressed.
posted by Ryvar at 9:52 PM on April 27, 2004

If it's that high, maybe you oughta think about cutting out some whitespace (and maybe tables, if there's a simpler way to do it.)
posted by trondant at 10:22 PM on April 27, 2004

I think everyone should help reduce matt's bandwidth by setting their font size smaller...
posted by Jimbob at 10:29 PM on April 27, 2004

Done and done!
posted by DrJohnEvans at 10:46 PM on April 27, 2004

Ah, my two open <small> tags were closed automatically, thus effectively putting to a halt my nefarious scheme of making all the text after my comment unnaturally small and truly separating the gullible from the, uh, non-guillible. Good work.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 10:49 PM on April 27, 2004

in order to help matt out with the monumental task of cutting out the white space, i have prepared this fully compliant, standards based visual aid template:

cut along dotted lines
----------------------------------------------
WHITE SPACE
----------------------------------------------
posted by quonsar at 11:44 PM on April 27, 2004

Racist!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:55 PM on April 27, 2004

That is racist (which I hate)
posted by cell divide at 12:12 AM on April 28, 2004

Ooooooooh. Mmmmmmm. Racist.

*adjusts tie*
posted by nthdegx at 12:20 AM on April 28, 2004

It's probably homophobic, too!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:20 AM on April 28, 2004

Wow. I mean. Wow. *is awestruck*
posted by tracicle at 1:15 AM on April 28, 2004

Let's say a thread is 100k of text (some of the long ones are 100k+). In your first view of it, you download 100k. You might make a comment. When you click preview, you download that 100k again, all of it - the text you have previously downloaded + any new comments. You post your comment: another 100k. You go back to check 5 minutes later: another 100k.

Because of the nature of this site (constantly updating) cached pages won't do it because you don't see anything new. The front page stands at 117k. Everytime I access that, I download the entire 117k (though the size varies) each time (again because of the nature of the site).

Bandwidth reports do not give a true indication of usage - for example if the pages I mentioned above were paginated or briefer in another way, I might be downloading 30k each time - a 70% drop in my bandwidth use, but no difference in my usage of the site.
posted by SpaceCadet at 1:46 AM on April 28, 2004

Also, I'm doing a sponsored front page refreshathon, so...

*bites bottom lip, makes a hands-raising gesture*
posted by nthdegx at 9:15 AM on April 28, 2004

While we're at it, Matt, what's the disk usage?
posted by scarabic at 10:50 AM on April 28, 2004

I figure the "Preview Comment" thing could just feed whatever messages are new to the thread plus the previously very-last-three messages. It's not that often one wants to see *all* the messages in a Preview (and if you do, hit Back and reread the thread).

Is the server using HTTP compression?
posted by five fresh fish at 2:30 PM on April 28, 2004

The disk usage is kinda high, about 120Gb of data on 170Gb worth of space. Over 50Gb is just the log files for MeFi alone.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:56 PM on April 28, 2004

I don't know about bandwidth, but this thread just (literally) fried my monitor - I was reading it when a black bar appeared in the centre of my monitor, which got wider and wider until I noticed smoke coming out of the top of it and a frying sound, when I turned it off. So, where do I send the bill for a new one?
posted by dg at 3:25 PM on April 28, 2004

my new text based monitor killing virus is unstoppable.
posted by quonsar at 3:30 PM on April 28, 2004

MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!
posted by ashbury at 3:58 PM on April 28, 2004

Just an idea: the dynamic threading K5 is using may do wonders for MeFi's bandwidth bill if used properly: instead of reloading the entire comments page on preview or on refresh, the page's JS can download just the new comments' HTML into the existing page (it looks like CF has that data already). I recommend the JSRS library which is quite cross-platform (IE, Mozilla, Opera, KHTML).
posted by costas at 7:39 PM on April 28, 2004

my new text based quonsar killing virus seems to be a dud.
posted by wendell at 8:05 PM on April 28, 2004

Quonsar can't assert that this sentence is true.

(...did it work?)
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:13 PM on April 28, 2004

his head exploded, but otherwise he's fine.
posted by amberglow at 8:20 PM on April 28, 2004

Just to make it clear to everyone, since I think it's so neato, I probably should have written:

“Quonsar can't assert that this sentence is true, even though everyone else can and it is.”

posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:32 PM on April 28, 2004

Silly Bligh. quonsar can assert anything he wants to.

*head explodes*
posted by Vidiot at 9:13 PM on April 28, 2004

Yeah. You know? I was afraid of that. Q is just too damn slippery for Man, the Rational Animal.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:24 PM on April 28, 2004

*torso explodes*
posted by quonsar at 10:18 PM on April 28, 2004

Oh, dear. Somebody get a mop.
posted by chicobangs at 8:07 AM on April 29, 2004