A Year in the Life of ColdFusion-Talk

 
Jan 03, 2000

by Judith Dinowitz

A tremendous thank you to the members of the CF-Talk list, who provided House of Fusion with some statistics on CF-Talk activity in 1999. Here are the results of their research:

An Overview

The number of email posts on CF-Talk last year totaled 40,427.
The top ten posters were:
833 dwatts@figleaf.com
551 paul.smith@sag.support.net
540 mdinowit@i-2000.com
499 jp@myob.net
477 pra@aspmedia.co.uk
446 howie@CoolFusion.com
429 hannum@ohio.edu
387 jason@logisoft.com
369 cameronc@mindspring.com
363 ian@apa.org

Volume and Bandwidth

At the currrent subscriber count on CF-Talk (over 1200), 40,427 posts would generate approximately 48,512,400 outgoing messages. If 90% of them (43,661,160) were sent out between the hours of 7:00AM and 10:00PM EST, that came to 7974 messages per hour during peak traffic, and 132 outgoing messages per minute. (During the week, this volume was probably higher than on the weekend.)

As Cameron Childress noted, "That's an awful lot of email service to be providing for free."

On Friday, January 7, 2000, between the hours of 10:00AM and 5:00PM EST, 95 messages were posted to the list. With over 1200 subscribers, that generated 16,285 outgoing emails at the average rate of 271 messages sent per minute or 4.5 emails every second.

Assume an average email of about 2 or 3K in size. That would put last year's bandwidth consumption by CF-Talk at a little less than 139 Gigs. If everyone trimmed just one kilobyte off their replies to the list, that would bring that number down to about 92 Gigs. This could make quite a difference when sending out 4.5 emails per second.

Based on these numbers, every 2K email sent to the list creates about 2.3 megs of outgoing email, but every 3K message creates 3.5 megs of outgoing email. So does it matter if you trim your posts? Apparently, on CF-Talk, the answer is "Yes!"

Composition of the Posts

One member of CF-Talk did a tally of the last few days' digests. He said that 40% of the traffic on CF-Talk is quotes from previous messages, and 5% of posts are in HTML (which creates about three times the traffic of normal messages.) As Rob Cawte put it, "In consideration of the list operator and the bandwidth challenged, it'd be real nice if people were a bit conscious about only quoting relevant parts of messages, and turning off HTML mail (yes, you CAN do it!)." Also, he suggested that people include links to websites rather than pasting in the HTML.

And the Conclusion?

These statistics serve to underscore the monumental task it can be to sustain CF-Talk (and the numerous related ColdFusion mailing lists on the roster here.) Many of our members, after seeing these figures, thanked Michael for his dedication in providing these resources to the community on his own free time. In turn, Michael and I would like to thank the community for being so responsive on the lists and in other forums. You help make the CF community the open, friendly place it is. Keep up the good work, and may we go into an even better year!

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