Traffic went up again
by Volker Weber
Traffic at vowe's magic flying circus went up by 15% in one week. The main RSS index gets 10,000 hits/day, the whole site is at 63,000 There are almost 5,000 distinct visitors, so the traffic spreads out nicely. However, I counted 714 hits from one IP-address in a single day, and that is a gateway of a rather small company. One hit every two minutes, and there have only been three updates to the site yesterday.
Check your RSS readers. I guess nobody reads the sidebar:
Technically you can refresh these files every four second. But we ask for a minimum refresh rate of 30 minutes. Once every two hours would be the recommended setting.
You don't have to update more often than once every two hours without missing too much. Hey, you need to get some work done in between anyway, don't you?
I have also been asked by a few people why they are being blocked when they just entered the site. In most cases it turned out to be a Firefox extension that pre-fetches all links from the page you are currently looking at. Well, you can only see 15 pages in 60 seconds. This should be enough, unless Firefox eats your lunch. ;-)
Comments
On this I have some reality as Sys Admin. I have Users who set up their machines to do just what you described and I wonder what all the traffic in the Network is about.
At THIS POINT, explaining and explaining is completely USELESS. The only thing that helps THEM and YOU is to adjust their System properly and then take away their rights to change the setting.
Checking your Website every 4 seconds doesn't seem werong with them, as their computer should be able to this without any problems and that's ist, this is the EXACT POINT where the thinking stops.
But I am really glad (don't get this wrong) that I am not the only one who has made contact with this type of species.
Steffen, in this particular case you are wrong. The person who was hitting my site every 2 minutes has just adjusted their system to poll every 60 minutes. Sometimes it is the software that comes with stupid defaults.
I know part of the issue is that many RSS readers don't allow a different polling interview for each site.
Sites such as BBC News, The Register and Fark have a fairly frequent update rate and 30min polling doesn't seem enough for these places. I guess it all depends how you use RSS.
Trust me, Ben. If your job is something else than covering news, then you are perfectly fine with one news update every two hours. As I said, you need to get something done in between anyway.
I guess it depends whether one is at work or not. If you're sat here re-ripping your enter music library into lossless having decided mp3 isn't all that after all...the faster the feed the better ;O)
Dear Volker, ok, I stand corrected. Could you please post the Name of the Software which has defaults set like that?
