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 102310 215 102525 44.4% 13328 420
Google 56742 5 56747 24.6% 2603 30
Bing 28394 511 28905 12.5% 3352 102
Meta 28494 7 28501 12.3% 6643 15
Apple 2609 3 2612 1.1% 262 19
DDG 1485 0 1485 0.6% 45 5
Bots 10339 8 10347 4.5% 5763 284
Total 230373 749 231122 100% 31996 875

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-06-07 Sunday 420
2026-06-06 Saturday 578
2026-06-05 Friday 1512
2026-06-04 Thursday 494
2026-06-03 Wednesday 491
2026-06-02 Tuesday 631
2026-06-01 Monday 483
2026-05-31 Sunday 546
2026-05-30 Saturday 1538
2026-05-29 Friday 1066
2026-05-28 Thursday 899
2026-05-27 Wednesday 1457
2026-05-26 Tuesday 1555
2026-05-25 Monday 649
2026-05-24 Sunday 489
2026-05-23 Saturday 561
2026-05-22 Friday 1303
2026-05-21 Thursday 2878
2026-05-20 Wednesday 1933
2026-05-19 Tuesday 1278
2026-05-18 Monday 812
2026-05-17 Sunday 787
2026-05-16 Saturday 556
2026-05-15 Friday 880
2026-05-14 Thursday 976
2026-05-13 Wednesday 893
2026-05-12 Tuesday 814
2026-05-11 Monday 674
2026-05-10 Sunday 443
average 28 days 970

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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I found this old cartoon in a box in the attic and decided to preserve it here. I actually went to rocket science school, for what it is worth.