R help - Nov 2005 - What made us so popular Nov 16-20?

Our main US mirror is cran.mirrors.pair.com, AKA cran.us.r-project.org. 
  Pair.com keeps statistics on traffic on the mirror sites, and I got 
all excited when I looked at this page:

http://mirrors.pair.com/pair/stats.html

and saw that CRAN was 5th most popular over the last month, getting more 
visitors than Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc.  Then I looked at this graph:

http://mirrors.pair.com/freebsd/stats/cran-ip.png

and saw that this is likely due to a huge spike in traffic between Nov 
16 and 20.  Our "visitors" (not sure of the exact definition) went
from
the usual  <10K/day up to 50-150K/day during that week.

Did we get mentioned somewhere (e.g. Slashdot), or was someone just 
experimenting with some automated downloading?

Duncan Murdoch

Duncan asks:
> Did we get mentioned somewhere (e.g. Slashdot), or was someone just
> experimenting with some automated downloading?
R was mentioned in last week's (I think) O'Reilly newsletter, which
included a link to a short article showing how easy it is to get R to
graph stuff like stock price histories.  That's the publisher, not the
talking head.

For what it's worth, the article isn't worth chasing down.  It left a
beginner like me disappointed that R's capabilities weren't better
shown, and that he relied on Perl to do data manipulation.

cur

--
Curt Seeliger, Data Ranger
CSC, EPA/WED contractor
541/754-4638
seeliger.curt at epa.gov

Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> writes:
> Our main US mirror is cran.mirrors.pair.com, AKA cran.us.r-project.org. 
>   Pair.com keeps statistics on traffic on the mirror sites, and I got 
> all excited when I looked at this page:
> 
> http://mirrors.pair.com/pair/stats.html
> 
> and saw that CRAN was 5th most popular over the last month, getting more 
> visitors than Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc.  Then I looked at this graph:
> 
> http://mirrors.pair.com/freebsd/stats/cran-ip.png
> 
> and saw that this is likely due to a huge spike in traffic between Nov 
> 16 and 20.  Our "visitors" (not sure of the exact definition)
went from
> the usual  <10K/day up to 50-150K/day during that week.
> 
> Did we get mentioned somewhere (e.g. Slashdot), or was someone just 
> experimenting with some automated downloading?
> 
Kevin Farnham's article on O'Reilly might have something to do with
it...

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/11/17/r_for_statistics.html

As the link suggests, it was published on the 17th.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             ??ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: (+45) 35327907

>>>>> "Duncan" == Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at
stats.uwo.ca> writes:
    > Then I looked at this graph:

    > http://mirrors.pair.com/freebsd/stats/cran-ip.png

    > and saw that this is likely due to a huge spike in traffic
    > between Nov 16 and 20.  

FWIW, apache shows a similar spike:
http://mirrors.pair.com/freebsd/stats/apache-xfer.pgn

Mike

I had too much time on my hands on a sunday morning:

For the hell of it I grepped my r-help date headers for the last month 
or two.  I was looking for some corresponding increase in r-help traffic.

The data is:
	http://brewiki.org/tmp/r-help_traffic.txt

The traffic looks something like:
	http://brewiki.org/tmp/r-help_traffic.png

I didn't take into account time zones for the plot (but I did plot the 
histogram of them).

cheers


Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> Our main US mirror is cran.mirrors.pair.com, AKA cran.us.r-project.org. 
>   Pair.com keeps statistics on traffic on the mirror sites, and I got 
> all excited when I looked at this page:
> 
> http://mirrors.pair.com/pair/stats.html
> 
> and saw that CRAN was 5th most popular over the last month, getting more 
> visitors than Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc.  Then I looked at this graph:
> 
> http://mirrors.pair.com/freebsd/stats/cran-ip.png
> 
> and saw that this is likely due to a huge spike in traffic between Nov 
> 16 and 20.  Our "visitors" (not sure of the exact definition)
went from
> the usual  <10K/day up to 50-150K/day during that week.
> 
> Did we get mentioned somewhere (e.g. Slashdot), or was someone just 
> experimenting with some automated downloading?
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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