Doing Things Wrong

Is This Worth It?

I put the finishing touches on the web stats programming, and after a few days I can confirm that most of the traffic on the internet is bots. That is, machines querying other machines. Only about 20-25% of the traffic is human beings. So if you're one of those, consider yourself special.

* Pages Search Total Misses * Today
Humans 134623 258 134881 47.0% 19866 660
Google 62576 9 62585 21.8% 3694 73
Bing 37413 639 38052 13.3% 4845 278
Meta 29831 7 29838 10.4% 11730 9
Apple 3267 3 3270 1.1% 370 8
DDG 2067 0 2067 0.7% 161 11
Bots 16265 8 16273 5.7% 7384 562
Total 286042 924 286966 100% 48050 1601

* includes pages, posts and archives since 2025-12-05


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-07-22 Wednesday 660
2026-07-21 Tuesday 1075
2026-07-20 Monday 562
2026-07-19 Sunday 552
2026-07-18 Saturday 1307
2026-07-17 Friday 546
2026-07-16 Thursday 972
2026-07-15 Wednesday 958
2026-07-14 Tuesday 655
2026-07-13 Monday 896
2026-07-12 Sunday 1565
2026-07-11 Saturday 1016
2026-07-10 Friday 445
2026-07-09 Thursday 563
2026-07-08 Wednesday 1208
2026-07-07 Tuesday 483
2026-07-06 Monday 1301
2026-07-05 Sunday 947
2026-07-04 Saturday 1143
2026-07-03 Friday 311
2026-07-02 Thursday 283
2026-07-01 Wednesday 795
2026-06-30 Tuesday 611
2026-06-29 Monday 690
2026-06-28 Sunday 1261
2026-06-27 Saturday 1768
2026-06-26 Friday 913
2026-06-25 Thursday 893
2026-06-24 Wednesday 512
average 28 days 865

Originally I used the built-in WordPress functions to update the counters. Those are big general-purpose routines that are slow and ponderous, and I noticed that there was some 'slippage' - numbers that should agree would slowly fall out of sync. So for the counter operations, I wrote my own code, which does only one thing, and does it very fast and reliably.

WordPress also provides hints for some browsers to 'pre-fetch' pages. In other words, the browser downloads a whole second page in the background on the off chance that you might look at it. Apart from doubling the load on the server and network, this also makes it impossible to keep accurate counts, so I turned that 'feature' off. Who thinks of these things?


Comments on Is This Worth It?

Keith:

September 14, 2020 at 5:20 PM

Keep it up - your stuff is special to us non-bots

Comments on Is This Worth It? closed.

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