Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcs!mnetor!seismo!cmcl2!philabs!polaris!herbie From: herbie@polaris.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: five years of traffic Message-ID: <644@polaris.UUCP> Date: Mon, 14-Jul-86 14:04:59 EDT Article-I.D.: polaris.644 Posted: Mon Jul 14 14:04:59 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 17-Jul-86 06:04:23 EDT References: <6913@utzoo.UUCP> <3640@ut-ngp.UUCP> Reply-To: herbie@polaris.UUCP (Herb Chong) Organization: IBM TJ Watson RC Lines: 123 In article <3640@ut-ngp.UUCP> werner@ut-ngp.UUCP (Werner Uhrig) writes: >I know that I contributed a couple of hundred articles (probably), but >what I'd really like to see now are statistics for the articles from >henry and chuq ....I figure that by now those guys must have developed >multiple personalities (that can all type well) in order to keep track >and respond to all those newsgroups that I see them posting to ... i know you didn't want a followup but i have some hard figures for a shorter period from October 23/84 to November 8/85. during that time, traffic through seismo (according to Rick Adams' collected data) can be summarized as: 1) 4013 different people posted 93,403 articles for a total traffic of 152,127 Kbytes of traffic. using Rick's formulae for estimating transmission costs, this works out to just under $4000. 2) 101,052 articles orignated from 776 different sites reached seismo and totalled 162,406 Kbytes. (Rick hasn't explained this discrepancy in his data.) cost of transmission ~ $4000. 3) 232 newsgroups had activity with 188,092 articles posted for a total of 243,638 Kbytes and a $6000 transmission cost. 4) the average poster posted 6.6351 articles every two weeks totalling 10.80 Kbytes including headers 5) the average newsgroup had 41.8820 articles posted to it every two weeks for a total traffic of 54.25 Kbytes. 7) the most prolifc poster in terms of articles as well as bytes posted was Rich Rosen (no surprises here as he was in the middle of a flaming war with the rest of the net) with 1296 articles totalling 3779 Kbytes. this works out to 48 articles and 140Kbytes every two weeks. this accounted for 1.39% of all articles posted and 2.48% of all Kbytes posted (incidentally, there was no traffic from Rich for two two-week periods so i assume that he was on vacation then and so the averages should be slightly higher). next in terms of number of articles posted is Henry Spencer with 705 and Chuqui was third with 703 (essentially neck and neck). 4th and below posted fewer than 600 articles each. number 4 was Jeff Meyer (Moriarty?), 5 was Chris Torek, 6 was Charley Wingate, 7 was Will Martin (who no longer has net access), 8 was Lauren Weinstein, 9 was Stanley Freisen (Sarima), and 10 was someone with the login mms1646@acf4.UUCP. during that period, i was 16 with 332 articles. in terms of # of bytes, tdn@cmu-cs.spice.ARPA was second with 1674 Kbytes (less than half of Rich Rosen's) and the rest trailed far behind. Rich Rosen posted 2.26 times as many bytes as the next closest person and only by summing 2, 3, and 4 would the total number of bytes have exceeded his. in terms of bytes posted, i was 40th. 8) the top 10 posters by articles accounted for 5,967 articles between them or 6.3844% of the total articles and the top 10 by bytes posted accounted for 13,826 Kbytes or 9.0885% of the total volume. 5 people were in both the top 10 by articles and by bytes posted: Rich Rosen, Chuqui, Jeff Meyer, Chris Torek, and Charlie Wingate. 9) the most prolific site during the measurement period was acf4.UUCP with 1318 articles or 1.3666% of the total number of articles posted. ucbvax is next because all the ARPA stuff from the fa and mod newsgroups go through it. pyuxd, Rich Rosen's home machine was 3. the list of top 10 sites corresponds closely to the list of top 10 posters. to me, this indicates that on these machines, the posting is dominated by one person. since at least half of them are VAXes, i would assume that they are not personal netnodes but it sure seemed that way as far as news was concerned. during the measurement interval, my home machine was watdcsu and it ranked 21 in terms of number of articles. i did my share. 10) in terms of number of bytes posted, pyuxd.UUCP (Rich's place) was #1 with 3814.03 Kbytes, ahead of ucbvax with 2774.17 and drutx.UUCP with 2599.91. Rich Rosen produced more bytes of articles than all of the fa and mod newsgroups combined. the top 10 sites posted 23,868.88 Kbytes of articles which was 14.697% of the total Kbytes posted. i should mention at this point that of the top 10 by bytes, exactly 1 site, utzoo, is listed on the official USENET backbone. the next site, watmath, was #24, and the next, cbosgd, was #33. 11) the most active newsgroup in terms of number of articles posted was net.politics with 7043, followed by net.flaem with 6366, net.sf-lovers with 5701, net.music with 5538 and so on down. net.politics accounted for 3.7444% of all articles posted. the top 10 groups' traffic totalled 53,494 articles or 28.4403% of all articles posted. of the top 10, only 2 could be construed as technical, net.unix-wizards and net.micro. 12) in terms of number of bytes posted, net.sources was first with 20,495 Kbytes or 8.4121% of the total. no big surprise here. net.politics was 2nd with 11,344.6, net.sources.mac with 10,988.3, net.religion with 9553.4, net.flame with 6377.2. the top 10 had a total traffic of 87,093 Kbytes or 35.7471% of the total. of the top 10, by bytes, net.sources, net.source.mac, net.micro.mac, and net.unix-wizards could be construed as technical. couclusions: 1) the top 25 posters accounted for about 10% of all article traffic with 4013 articles between them. 2) the top 25 sites accounted for 20% of all traffic. 3) the top 25 newsgroups account for more than 40% of all traffic 4) the net is mostly non-technical in terms of traffic with about 60% devoted to groups that fall in the talk or rec categories. 5) there are few active posters to the net and their sites dominate the newsgroups. 6) almost all net traffic originates outside the backbone sites although i suspect that many of the originating sites are at most 1 or 2 hops from a backbone for news feeds. in other words, the backbone pays an awful lot to handle other people's stuff. this article was sent as a letter to almost all backbone news admins in late March of this year. if you are a backbone news admin and never received a copy, this is it. more detailed data available by e-mail only. Herb Chong, IBM Research... I'm still user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble.... VNET,BITNET,NETNORTH,EARN: HERBIE AT YKTVMH UUCP: {allegra|cbosgd|cmcl2|decvax|ihnp4|seismo}!philabs!polaris!herbie CSNET: herbie%ibm.com@csnet-relay ARPA: herbie@ibm.com, herbie%yktvmh.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu ======================================================================== DISCLAIMER: what you just read was produced by pouring lukewarm tea for 42 seconds onto 9 people chained to 6 Ouiji boards.