Tuesday, August 14, 2007
And here I thought my bandwidth drop in mid-2002 was due to implementing an RSS feed for my site
I did a bit more probing of my webstats and located when my bandwidth shot up—February 22nd 2006:
Date | Bytes | Hits | Status | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Okay (200) | Redirects (300) | Client errors (400) | Server errors (500) | |||
02-19-06 | 12,167,334 | 2,240 | 2,075 | 163 | 2 | 0 |
02-20-06 | 11,955,375 | 2,017 | 1,863 | 151 | 3 | 0 |
02-21-06 | 12,511,210 | 2,372 | 2,197 | 173 | 2 | 0 |
02-22-06 | 56,693,839 | 2,145 | 1,792 | 137 | 13 | 203 |
02-23-06 | 45,939,357 | 1,737 | 1,563 | 152 | 5 | 17 |
I checked the logs on the on the 21st and 22nd, and for some odd reason, Apache didn't bother logging the bytes transferred on the 21st (and prior) but did starting on the 22nd (and afterwards). I switched servers in February of this year so that's not the explanation—perhaps I upgraded Apache that month or something (since most of the pages served up on this domain are done via a CGI script, it looked like Apache didn't bother to track the amount of data served in that case, and later versions do).
That might also explain the drop in bandwidth around July/August of 2002—I might have upgraded Apache then and that particular version didn't record the bytes sent via a script properly. So basically, the bandwidth metric is useless between July 2002 and February 2006.
Not that I'm overly concerned about it—it was more curiosity than anything else (and if need be, I could reconstruct the data since I have versions of previous templates used, but there's no need).
Also contributing to the spike in early 2006 are actual traffic spikes that happened in April of 2007, like here:
Date | Bytes | Hits | Status | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Okay (200) | Redirects (300) | Client errors (400) | Server errors (500) | |||
03-31-06 | 49,231,768 | 1,977 | 1,771 | 196 | 8 | 2 |
04-01-06 | 148,802,602 | 5,442 | 5,233 | 171 | 38 | 0 |
04-02-06 | 59,528,160 | 2,197 | 2,030 | 164 | 2 | 1 |
But those are more easily explained as simply more hits.