On 18/12/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> (And I realise Alexa numbers are less than widely
respected, but still
> consider that they give us some idea of scale, i.e. we're currently in
> the range of 1/5 to 1/10 Google's page views. JESUS CHRIST IT'S A LION
> GET IN THE CAR)
You're giving too much credibility to the alexa
data. There are sites
which are ranked somewhat lower than us which I know for a fact are
processing more req/s.
That's a pity - 70,000 users is really quite a high-resolution sample
[*]; it's a pity their sample selection is evidently crappy.
It is indisputable, however, that we are one of the
more visited sites around.
The traffic stats yearly graph makes that clear. 1 gigabit/second
sustained, doubling in the last six months ... if we could just slow
it down to Moore's Law rates ...
[*]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error - in a result which
many statistics students find surprising, the margin of error depends
*only* on the number of samples taken, not on the size of the sampled
population. Most political polls, for example, sample about 2000
people; sampling 70k is a *lot* of people.
- d.