Raspberry Pi interest breaks site traffic records
Posted by Andrew Hodgkinson Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:16:00 GMT
Over the years traffic to the ROOL web site steadily increased as news of the project gently spread out from the core RISC OS crowd to a wider audience. As more and more of the OS became available, our site page hits gradually increased, along with the amount of data we sent out (bandwidth used) each month.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Raspberry Pi release created a big spike in traffic. We fell just slightly short of 2 million hits in November 2012, with over 115GiB of data sent out. In the whole year of 2011 we reached 5.5M hits and 160GiB data; the October and November 2012 data total exceeds all of 2011 and the hit count is already at over ten million for the year, with most of December still to come.
November 7th in particular brought a huge spike in traffic, after RISC OS on RPi was covered in various popular technology related web sites.
Our stats analysis software wasn’t able to determine the origin for around 70% of the traffic – no referring page means it could have been generated by bookmarks, e-mail links and so-on. Of the remaining 30%, it’s perhaps unsurprising that over half of our visitors come via Raspberry Pi site links, especially this page, with around another 25% of the identified sources being the Register article on RPi RISC OS. Curiously, the Ars Technica article barely registers.
Although 2 million hits in a month is only around one per second on average, spikes of traffic on particular hours led at one point to our server provision being overwhelmed as the server software consumed more and more resources in an attempt to handle all incoming requests simultaneously (oops!). We’ve since limited the response rate to avoid too much load and cut out a site section or two (the “photos” section is missing still, for example) to further help (independent site sections are quite resource intensive). A medium term plan involves server software changes and some streamlining that should allow us to handle substantially greater peak loads in future with no change in our hosting provision.
Thanks for all your interest in RISC OS on Raspberry Pi – it’s great to see such life in the platform again!
NB: On some browsers with JavaScript enabled, the graphs above will be interactive. Click and drag to zoom in or double click to zoom out with a mouse. On touch-based devices, try pinch-to-zoom gestures horizontally or vertically. The graphs use the dygraphs visualisation library.
Graphs have floated right, under the right-hand panel, in Firefox.
That’s due to a rather serious
<canvas>positioning fault (I tested Firefox 5, 12 and 17 – all broken!). It was fixed on our site via a CSS bodge a while ago though; you may need to force a page reload.Alternatively, if you have a machine that can run a WebKit based engine like Chrome, Chromium or Safari, I recommend switching to that – I gave up struggling with Firefox rendering bugs quite some time ago. IMHO it jumped the shark around about the time it broke its own version numbering ;-)
Chrome 23.0.1271.95 m mucks up the graphs upon initial page load. I did a force refresh to get things back to normal.