Web site statistics
 

There's been a bit of discussion (!) recently on website usage - during the ongoing investigations into the causes for the current website instability, the analysis has given us the following figures:

Bandwith usage is averaging 2.3 Gb per day
Avg. hits per day > 170,000
Avg Pages served per day >30,000

Analysing the postings made since June 2005:
A total of 1088 web users made all the postings.
80% of posts are made by 154 website users of which 121 are club members.
This means that 80% of posts were made by 14% of the users.

/anoraks

(updated to include Avg pages / day)

[Edited on 16-2-2006 by Eamonn]

Surely the most important statistic is the number of hits per day - 170,000 :o

What a shop window for the club and Ducati :eureka:

Don't get too carried away with website hits (on any website). This figure can easily be increased/decreased by either including or excluding graphics within a web page. For example, at the top left of the screen next to the 'Search' word there is a small magnifying glass image. By putting a second magnifying glass on the page, the number of hits would also increase - equally if we removed the small icons and left purely the text names of the functions, the hits would drop.

The best figure (IMO) to use is the number of pages viewed per day - and that's one I don't have to hand right now.... typical ! I'll have to rerun the analysis programs again.....:)

Eamonn

[Edited on 16-2-2006 by Admin]

first thing i'd do is look at the bandwidth... that's a highly likliehood of two things.

1. high cost to run
2. problems with site


get the Avatars off, the sigs off and the pic hosting off. (sorry all, but it's really the best option).

[Edited on 16-2-2006 by weeksy2]

You could well be right Steve, but the last time I suggested removing avatars etc., I wasn't very popular..... ! :D

that was before the site was falling over more than Coco the clown mate :)

i rekon if the knockers can't accept it and think it's worth testing to bring the bandwidth down....

then tough really... people want improvements... i personally would't give them the option :)

80% of posts are made by 154 website users of which 121 are club members.

How many club member do we have?

Forcing people to host their avatars elsewhere would remove a large chunk of the traffic.

The other (more expensive) option would be to use someone like Akamai for distributed caching. We use them at work and they handle >95% of our daily traffic (about 3m page views/day, 450gb/day).

2.3Gb/day sounds very high for a site where most of the images should be cached pretty quickly. What about entirely separate hosting for the uploaded images. I'm sure this could be coded in, and would take a lot of the strain off the BB server.

Good luck.

Ali

I can't see how the sigs would contribute at all to the bandwidth (other than a tiny bit of text). You can't upload images, so they must be hosted elsewhere, so there's no transfer through the DSC servers.

The number of club members using the website isn't the point. The purpose of the website is the point.

What is the club's reason for having a website in the first place? If it's to allow non club members and members alike to have access to an online community for all the good reasons that can offer then we need a website.

If we need a website we need one that offers a good level of performance. Currently with broadband and a new computer running huge processor speed and 1GB RAM the pages on this site still take anything up to 15 seconds to load. Why? No other messageboard I visit takes that long.

If we need new software it's not expensive to get. If we need a new ISP then they're out there. If we need to pay someone to transfer it all the club has to decide to pay that money - if - the business case for providing a website as part of the club package is proven.

So it's not about how many paying club members post on the site - it's how much value the site offers the club.

Hang on, lets not get too carried away trying to solve a problem we don't understand yet! Sheesh!

My personal opinion, and I'm happy to be proven wrong if it means this gets solved quicker, is that I don't believe that the website traffic volume is creating the issue. I have two other theories but until I can get some sort of corroboration out of the logs or stats I won't know if they're accurate or not.

And if it was the website itself causing the issue, how do we know whether it's the front end and not the back end?

Bit of a trap for young players I've found whilst consulting for myself ... don't try and solve the problem before you have all the information, the client generally knows enough to know they haven't given you that yet ;)

Can Iask how come other forums, say VD with something like 1000 registered people on-line let alone "guests" and pretty much every option enabled (seach is disabled during peak hours) i.e. avatars, signatures etc they rarely have an issue?

Exactly Henners.... as has previously been stated for members (paid up members) further afield this is usually their only form of contact with other members, and they are disappearing fast looking at various comments (ScottyB and DCR to name 2 off the top of my head)

If you and Ian stopped posting then the bandwith would HALF Im sure :D:D:D;);)

All that electrickery jargon rubbish is doing my head in! Why don't you just get the hamster a smaller wheel to run in, then each of his steps will give a greater change of arc so he'd get more turns of the dynamo with each step! Does anybody know what gearing he's running and we may be able to optimise that as well! Easy when you know how innit :biaggi:

Its GREAT to see some constructive and helpful comments like Ali's for a change.

I certainly know I'm getting tired of reading anything unhelpful / negative, especially given that the IT are obviously working hard behind the scenes.

I think you are being harsh there Frank. There's been plenty of constructive comments out there.

As Weeksy said - turn off all the eye-candy and you go a good way to reducing load on the server.

Sorry about that!!! I'm just getting abit tried of all the knocking going on.

I cant imagine how hard it must be trying to look after a few thousand 'member' and tens of thousands of posts.....I get a bad enough time trying to look after our wifi network for my wife and daughter...or maybe thats worse :lol::lol::lol:

Cheers - Frank

However, investigation shows that the "eye candy" is not the problem.

Did or didn't Ali say:

"Forcing people to host their avatars elsewhere would remove a large chunk of the traffic."

That's eye candy, isn't it?

*sigh*

Yes he did say that.

However (as posted in the other thread) the images hosted on this server only account for (roughly) 15% of the daily traffic (in bandwidth terms) so removing these would not have the effect that you are expecting it to.

This conclusion was made after spending time studying the weblogs of the server and running various stats programs on them, rather than uninformed specualtion as to what the problem may be.

The webteam are now looking at the other remaining possible causes to the problem to ensure that they have an accurate picture of why the board is failing, rather than throwing random solutions at it that could make it worse.

Hum, 30,000 pages per day is an awful lot and doesn't match the pages read on each thread so either main site is heavily hit or those search refreshes are generating traffic.

A quick look at upnorth stats with auto refresh searches on shows those search pages account for 15% of total traffic and showthreads is only 22% so searches which don't have avatars, sigs pictures etc are moving almost as much data as the threads themselves. Those 2 are the by far the biggest the next closest only generates 4%.

Is it our own server or do we use a web hosting firm? If the latter why don't you change hosts. My hoster provides 350Gb traffic and 20Gb space etc etc and guarantee 99.9% up-time all for $6.50 a month. It's only a suggestion:rolleye:

They actually guarantee 8 hours 47 mins of downtime a year?

What a strange guarantee :lol:

Just kidding :)

[Edited on 18-2-2006 by domski]