Naturally enough, I wanted to check how many persons download and have
downloaded Cactus so far ... It's funny how numbers can widely differ ....
Approach 1 :
* I did a grep commons-cactus-22 and 23 on the apache webserver logs (for
month of august). I found the daily numbers to vary from 30 to 600 per day,
with an average of about 100. This means, in total about 100 downloads of
version 22 or 23. I did not count the src dist or ant zip one. On a month
that means about 3000 downloads
Approach 2 :
* I noticed that yesterday there 600 downloads for commons-cactus-23. That
looked strange. It was actually the same person (machine) who did call about
500 times the file. So I figured that approach 1 was not good enough. I did
a sort on IP addresse (for the month of august), disregarding of whether the
persons downloaded version 22, 23, ant or src. I found numbers between 20
and 100 daily downloads, with an average of 60. On a month that means about
1800 downloads (1200 less downloads that what approach 1 gave !)
* I got the following exact figures for the different months :
April (9th to 30th) : 821
May : 1445
June : 1130
July : 1650
Aug (1st to 13th): 762
That makes a total number of downloads of 5808 since the first release of
Cactus in Jakarta land.
Approach 3 :
* I then imagined that between different months, it could be the same
persons that would download different versions of Cactus. So I did a global
grep on all months since the 9th of april to the 13th of august and got a
total number of 4988 downloads.
Approach 4 :
* The number 4988 download is still not compeltely accurate as some persons
are behind an ISP that will give them different IP addresses everytime they
connect. I have no way of evaluating this but it means that the real number
is probably smaller than 4988 but I would say it is a good approximation.
It means that there are approx. 39 downloads of Cactus per day (Cactus has
been up on Jakarta for 126 days now).
... And initially I thought that there were 100 downloads per day .... But I
find 39 to be quite good already for such a niche domain and also not still
very wide known. Unit testing is yet to become a standard practice ... Also
if we look at approach 3 numbers we can see there is progress (1130 in june,
1650 in july, 1800 in august if numbers continue at the same rate) !
39 new persons download Cactus every day ...
Let's try to make some more extrapolations ... :)
In practice I would say that about :
- 50% do not even unzip it (I think a lot of person would download things to
have a look later on but won't do it in the end for lack of time, or they
forgot or they find someone better suited for their job at hand). That
leaves us with 17 persons
- out of these 50%, 50% additional do not understand the concepts or fail to
install it, that leaves us with 8 persons
- out of these 8 persons, probably 50% do not have a use for it and were
just doing some research. That leaves us with 4 persons
So roughly I would say that 4 more new persons really use Cactus every day !
Not bad!
What do you think?
Thanks
-Vincent
