Xref: utzoo news.misc:1885 news.admin:3788 Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!purdue!spaf From: spaf@cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford) Newsgroups: news.misc,news.admin Subject: Some interesting news stats Message-ID: <5200@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> Date: 24 Oct 88 15:01:39 GMT Article-I.D.: medusa.5200 Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU Reply-To: spaf@arthur.cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University Lines: 91 I recently made a presentation on the Usenet and NNTP to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), and I pulled together a bunch of stats about the Usenet. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this before, so I thought I'd also publish some of them here for your amusement. The following numbers are derived from old postings and data from the following people: Henry Spencer, Steve Bellovin, Mark Horton, Rick Adams, Brian Reid, and me. Some observations: 1) Growth in sites. The Usenet has been growing by an approximate doubling (or better) each year. (see below) 2) Growth in volume. The number of articles posted to the net has approximately doubled each year. The sum total of article sizes has not been growing as quickly as the number of articles. That is, the average article SIZE has decreased over time, but the article COUNT has increased. (see below) 3) Well over 1 million articles have been posted to the Usenet since its origination in 1979. 4) If you make some very conservative assumptions about the cost of operation of Usenet, you get some astonishing numbers. Assume that each of the estimated 11000 current Usenet sites spends approximately $10 per day on Usenet -- communicattions charges, cpu time and disk time. Further assume that, on the average, each of the 303,000 (est.) Usenet readers spends 20 minutes per day reading/posting news, at an average hourly wage of $15 per hour per person (if they were working). Then, the total cost of Usenet at its current size is $593,125,000 per year! Even if those numbers are off by a factor of 10 (doubtful), those numbers are staggering! 5) Latest figures show that 97% of all articles reach the well-connected sites within 72 hours. Effectively, this means that almost every site has a delay of at most 6 days before seeing a posting, and most see articles within 3 days. Approximately 82% of all posted articles are available to the well-connected sites within 24 hours of posting (largely thanks to NNTP). Some possible conclusions that can be drawn from this: I) Volume has been increasing due to the addition of new sites and new posters. The trend with people who have been on the net for a while seems to be to post less and post shorter articles. The increase in the number of newsgroups does not correlate well with the increase in volume (although it may correlate well with postings going into the wrong groups due to namespace pollution). II) At the current rate of growth, Usenet will pass its 2nd millionth message sometime in 1990. By the end of that year, message traffic would be approximately 8000 messages per day, exchanged by 50,000 Usenet sites. I cannot conceive of that happening (although 2 years ago I could not conceive of over 10K sites & 4Mb per day traffic, either!); I suspect something will happen to break the network up before then -- either due to internal pressure, or external forces concerned about costs and traffic. We already see this happening with alternate distributions and the surge in mailing lists. III) I don't want to even try to speculate what will happen once hypermedia Usenet becomes available.... Some year-by-year figures: 1979: 3 sites, 2 articles per day 1980: 15 sites, 10 articles per day 1981: Usenet described in Usenix conference -- sites invited to join. Notesfile system comes on-line and joins Usenet. This explains jump in sites, although postings remain low because groups are mostly technical & Unix-oriented and few "novice" users use the groups. 1981: about 150 sites, 20 articles per day 1982: about 400 sites, 35 articles per day 1982: Did 4.1 or 4.2 BSD come out around here? That would explain the sudden jump in postings, I believe. 1983: over 600 sites, 120 articles per day 1984: over 900 sites, 225 articles per day 1985: over 1300 sites, 375 articles per day, 1Mb+ per day 1986: about 2500 sites, 500 articles per day, 2Mb+ per day 1986: NNTP introduced. MLZ compression in news 2.10. 1987: about 5500 sites, 1000 articles per day, 2.4Mb+ per day 10/1/1988: almost 11,000 sites, 1800 articles per day, 4Mb per day -- Gene Spafford NSF/Purdue/U of Florida Software Engineering Research Center, Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004 Internet: spaf@cs.purdue.edu uucp: ...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf