Wikipedia:Traffic

Note: recent statistics are now automatically compiled, and can be found at /stats/

A proper explanation of hits vs. files served vs. pages served needs to go here. The effect of the new page-caching code on measured traffic should also be explained.

Alexa.com independently compiles traffic ranking figures, see [1] (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=wikipedia&p=Det_W_g_40_M1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikipedia.org%2F).

Some late 2002 / early 2003 daily traffic figures for the English-language Wikipedia in hits/day:

• note the apparent 7-day cycle, as well as
• the one-off boost on September 11, 2002, the anniversary of the New York terrorist attacks, when many queries were made regarding topics related to the attacks.
• traffic in January 2003 was well down on previous traffic, due to a problem with robots.txt causing Google to lose most Wikipedia pages from its index; this problem has now been fixed, and the Google index should start to pick up new pages as the site is spidered

Traffic data is measured in hits per day for each 24-hour period, from 00:00:00 UTC to 23:59:99 UTC.

Data set for the graph above:

• See Wikipedia:Traffic/2002 traffic data

2003 traffic data

 2003 Jan 01, 153536
 2003 Jan 02, 199442
 2003 Jan 03, 215752
 2003 Jan 04, 119583

 2003 Jan 06, 130032
 2003 Jan 07, 151027
 2003 Jan 08, 180543
 2003 Jan 09, 188562
 2003 Jan 10, 141881
 2003 Jan 11, 210633

 2003 Feb 19, 183900
 2003 Feb 20, 198233
 2003 Feb 21, 209976
 2003 Feb 22, 164776
 2003 Feb 23, 169201
 2003 Feb 24, 199651
 2003 Feb 25, 238234
 2003 Feb 26, 230582
 2003 Feb 27, 213807
 2003 Feb 28, 193870
 2003 Mar 01, 170235
 2003 Mar 04, 206824
 2003 Mar 05, 178290
 2003 Mar 06, 178856
 2003 Mar 07, 195111
 2003 Mar 08, 169019
 2003 Mar 09, 179610
 2003 Mar 10, 246672
 2003 Mar 11, 286787,  big slowdown on this day
 2003 Mar 12, 316539,  back to over 300k, problems with timeouts
 2003 Mar 13, 302237,  traffic is way back up again!

Average hits per hour in the period Aug 25 2002 - Sep 20 2002

Data for this graph:

 hours, avg hits/hour
 00, 8680
 01, 8278
 02, 8169
 03, 7902
 04, 7730
 05, 7221
 06, 7763
 07, 7413
 08, 7804
 09, 8080
 10, 7948
 11, 7851
 12, 8743
 13, 9743
 14, 9998
 15, 10125
 16, 10317
 17, 10950
 18, 10778
 19, 10084
 20, 9676
 21, 9010
 22, 8806
 22, 8806
 23, 8637

Notes

September 4, 2002: Server load average is currently running at between 5 and 6.

 7:00am  up 55 days, 24 min,  2 users,  load average: 4.46, 5.64, 5.85

September 11, 2002:

On the first anniversary of the WTC attacks, the server was running at 13786 hits/hour in the period 20020911 20:00 to 20:59. If running continuously at this rate, this would equate to a daily hit rate of 330000 hits/day. (Note that the actual whole-day traffic for this day was only 260034 hits.) The server struggled to keep pace with the load on this day.

A few representative "uptime" results for September 11, 2002:

  9:25pm  up 5 days, 17:48,  1 user,  load average: 4.60, 9.68, 13.22
  9:34pm  up 5 days, 17:56,  2 users,  load average: 9.57, 8.64, 10.83
  9:34pm  up 5 days, 17:57,  2 users,  load average: 12.76, 9.38, 11.02
  9:34pm  up 5 days, 17:57,  2 users,  load average: 18.07, 10.80, 11.44
  9:35pm  up 5 days, 17:58,  2 users,  load average: 19.50, 12.29, 11.93
  9:40pm  up 5 days, 18:03,  2 users,  load average: 3.80, 7.92, 10.22
  9:41pm  up 5 days, 18:04,  2 users,  load average: 4.96, 7.74, 10.06

In the minute 20020911 20:35, the server served 305 hits, a rate of just over 5 hits per second sustained, equivalent to a sustained rate of just under 440,000 hits/day. It did this at a loadav of around 19, rather than the typical loadav of 5 or 6.

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