in the past few months the load on the server was so high we could never serve everyone who wanted to visit the website, it was always down or too slow on rush hours, after moving the aggregator to a new codebase things are working fine, we sometimes see 600 visitors on a single hour.

what this means we won't be able to measure the true popularity of this website until the end of december when a month has passed with the new setup.

but it is still interesting to look at server logs from time to time, specially after we won that BOB.

last time I analyzed server logs was on June 2005, here is a quick analysis of October 2005 logs.

in the last move I misconfigured apache, the logs do not contain referral or user agent info which means I can't filter out bots and spam accurately this time, so I'm just extrapolating here, as with any log analysis take this with a grain of slat.

there are some surprises when one compares June and October.

Quick Analysis of Manalaa.net October 2005 traffic

Hits

Successful GET hits

839412

Successful POST hits

14987

Other successful hits

2508

we got 1.5 times the number of hits we got on June not bad.

Overhead

Administration overhead hits

1745

BOTS

we got 4359 on robots.txt, double the amount in June, extrapolating this probably means something close to 30000 hits by BOTS but could be anything

Visits to Atom2RSS gateway by aggregator

112628

favicon.ico

3799

Site Logo

50816

CSS

125306

as usual I'm counting overlaps here so overhead is not really that big.

interestingly bots, css and logo hits almost doubled since June, but favicon is still the same, what does it mean? some of the extra traffic is by frequent visitors visiting more frequently maybe?

Atom2RSS gateway overhead doubled because we added more blogs, only normal, this is the last time we'll see this overhead, new aggregator code can parse atom without the need for a gateway.

The Aggregator

the aggregator had 23354 visits last month, thats actually less than in June, it either means the aggregator is loosing popularity, or people have no time to browse it's pages and just use the sidebars, or this is due to the downtime caused by the aggregator. (I did take it down several times on september and october after all, we'll find out for sure next month).

Main Page

front page hits

25914

site rss feed hits

13198

events calendar

12769

image galleries

8074

bloggers forum

2314

hotspots reviews

1944

search

837

new posts and comments trakcer

623

note that I only calculated front page and rss feeds visits in June, front page hits almost doubled. RSS feed is much more popular now.

the forums, and event calendars are new features, they seem to be popular enough I just wish people would contribute to them more.

not when I say forum, event calendar, hotspot reviews and image galleries I mean people who browse these features, not just land on page related to them. ya3ni many more people look at photos through links in articles than through browsing galleries.

Multimedia

files/*

205743

thumbnails

153604

photos

42801

I no longer serve all multimedia files from the files/ directory, I run a separate small footprint http server for large files in order to conserve RAM so this does not show videos and audio files.

no increase here though, our multimedia files have fixed popularity (note though that we aren't coming up with as many interesting photos as we used to).

Politics

never_froget

48

I was too lazy to figure out what would have been the key political articles in October and check their trends, I just looked at the famous never forget document, old material doesn't live long on the blogosphere and thats why we need to thing of hybrid formats, the document is obviously not as popular as it was, but then again maybe everyone already got a copy, or maybe it is hosted in hundreds of different places, who knows.

Writing

we got 58096 visits on full article pages last month, note this means people who probably read the whole article and it's comments, sme of them came through the rss feed, the front page, the aggregator, google, or a link referring to one of the blog posts.

again almost double the rate in June.

if I can make a conclusion it would be

this blog's popularity increased but the aggregator did no

I'm not sure this is accurate, remember the aggregator was not performing well and I can't be sure about BOT activity.

but on the other hand it could be true, drupal is reporting more page hits and we got more comments than we used to get.