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Web Access Statistics

An analysis of the departmental web-server access logs from September 2002 until August 2003 (totalling 10,654,881 accesses) reveals popular operating systems and browsers used to access this site.

Browser Accesses
MSIE 6,145,853
Mozilla 3,039,565
Googlebot 156,929
Opera 70,410
Scooter 41,799
Konqueror 20,543
Firebird 7,390
pie chart- browser accesses
Table & Chart 1: Access by browser type

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (versions 4, 5 and 60) has the greatest share of accesses at 65%. Netscape (Mozilla 4, 5, and 7) is the next most popular browser with 32% and is the standard browser in the E.E. Department. Google's indexer (Googlebot) has the third highest access rate followed by the Opera browser, the AltaVista indexer (Scooter), Konqueror (KDE Desktop) and Firebird, the recent Mozilla browser spin-off.

OS Accesses
Windows 98 2,117,395
SunOS 1,779,734
Linux 588,255
Windows XP 344,699
Windows NT 4 212,041
Macintosh 59,428
BSD 8,296
pie chart- os accesses
Table & Chart 2: Access by operating system

Since its release, nearly two years ago in October 2001, Windows XP (7% of accesses) trails Windows 98 (41% of the share) considerably. A high percentage of SunOS (aka Solaris, 35%) and GNU/Linux (12%) accesses are from workstations within the department.

Excluding "abnormalities" local to this server, these statistics tend to agree with the Google Zeitgeist— Microsoft's browser and operating system dominate the web on the client side1 and Windows 98 is still the most popular of Microsoft's OS offering2.

hourly stats
Graph 1: Hourly accesses from Feb. 2003 to Aug. 2003

Graph 1, above, charts web pages every hour since February 2003. The number of accesses drop by about 50% during the summer months and begin to increase again as the school year begins. The large spikes are from bots (Google, Altavista) periodically indexing the entire website; beginning in June, Google began indexing more aggressively. Missing data for August 19 and 20 was due to the power blackout.

0 MSIE 6 has 3,686,966 accesses; 60% of all MSIE (4, 5, and 6) accesses.

1 On the server side however, it's a different story. The free-software Apache web-server (typically run on GNU/Linux, BSD and Solaris servers) leads with 64% of the share, followed by Microsoft's IIS server with 24%.

2 The large percentage of Windows 98 accesses are due to the popularity of one particular webpage hosted on this server.

Notes:

  • Browser and OS accesses were counted using: zcat access.log*.gz |grep XYZ|wc -l, where XYZ is the text that appears in the "OS" and "Browser" column of each table. "Mozilla" counts were gathered using: zcat access.log*.gz |grep Mozilla/|grep -v compatible|wc -l because MSIE reports itself as "Mozilla compatible". Total accesses were gathered using: zcat access.log*.gz |wc -l.
  • 3D pie-charts were plotted using StarChart, the spreadsheet that is part of the StarOffice suite from Sun Microsystems.
  • The graph of web accesses was plotted using gnuplot, via an automated script that runs on the web-server every hour. This mechanism was installed to monitor and detect traffic anomalies (e.g. network attacks).
Last modified: Tuesday, 14-Jul-2015 18:07:09 EDT