_xeno_'s Journal: KDE Mirror: Getting Slashdotted (sorta)

Well, here we go with the initial "Getting Slashdotted" journal entry a day later than I had hoped to do. Since journals can be updated, I'll update this entry as I do more stuff with the data I logged. (Side note: this is the first journal where I'm not bitching about Slashdot!)

Anyway, I mirrored some screenshots mentioned in "KDE 3.0 Screenshots" as the KDE sight had basically been shot to hell. (It should be noted that when I grabbed the shots there were like 5 comments on the story and I failed to download most of the little images that surround the KDE page - fortunately, I was able to grab the images themselves. I didn't get the stylesheet they used, so that was left out of the mirror as well (doesn't really matter).)

I started getting hits literally seconds after posting the comment. I reached something like 3,000 hits in the first half hour. (All this is logged so if I ever get off my lazy ass I can check the logs and get more exact times - although I also found out that my server's clock is off by a few minutes.)

My server logs were set to log everything seeing as my site's not very - well, useful. And I'm anal like that. (Well, not quite everything - it logs the time of the request, the request itself, the response code, the number of bytes sent, and the Referrer and User-Agent headers. Which is basically everything useful that Apache will log.)

I've churned through the 50,000 hits that this has caused so far (50,420 as of right now) and have some interesting statistics about the Slashdot readership. (Small rant: why no <PRE> in the journal? Update 2002-08-19: Because there's now <ecode>.)

When reading the following, remember that these are users who are interested in KDE 3 in theory. It's also probable that a large number of users were at work when viewing the page.

Browser Actually Used By Slashdotters

Galeon .............. 511 .. 3.00%
iCab .................. 9 .. 0.02%
Konqueror .......... 4149 .. 8.25%
Lynx .................. 6 .. 0.01%
Internet Explorer . 24885 . 49.47%
Mozilla ............ 9340 . 18.57%
Netscape ........... 3756 .. 7.47%
OmniWeb ............. 190 .. 0.38%
Opera .............. 3267 .. 6.50%
Other .............. 3187 .. 6.34%

Note: Other contains browsers whose User-Agents could not be parsed. It may contain valid browsers, but for the most part is either badly formed User-Agent strings or unknown User Agents.

The other interesting statistic culled from the User-Agents are the operating systems reported...

Operating Systems Reported by Slashdotters

Unix ..... 1468 ... 3.23%
BSD ....... 481 ... 1.06%
Linux ... 12193 .. 26.80%
Windows . 31072 .. 68.29%
Mac ....... 227 ... 0.50%
BeOS ....... 57 ... 0.13%

Notes:

• Unix is a collection of AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and SunOS, as well as any User Agent which claimed to be an X11 client.
• BSD is a collection of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
• Windows is a collection of Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
• Mac is any client claiming to belong to any Macintosh platform.

Make of these what you will :).

Update 2002-08-19: Cstrike is dead, probably never to return. (Although it is now clear that eventually I will be a WPI student again and probably will be able to get my degree - I hope.) I reformated that tables so that they would line up thanks to the Slashcode update that removes any extra spacing and any HTML entites besides &amp;, &lt;, or &gt;. (Update 2004-07-10: Cstrike is the server name, and yeah, it's down, permenantly.)