The SysAdmin Diary

Holidays and traffic trends

I’ve always found Internet traffic trends fascinating, especially when they’re out of the “ordinary”. One of the main sites I look after has a peak on Monday-Tuesday followed by a 50% reduction in traffic over the weekend. This changes when one of two events occur — a Holiday/three-day-weekend, and over Christmas-New Year. Christmas/New Year is something I’ll post about at that time but recently (last week) I observed a US Monday Holiday in my traffic charts:

This chart is from one of my web servers (note that the times/dates are my local time +0800, where as the site is based in the US and the traffic patterns). It shows the Monday-Tuesday peak, followed by the slight reduction through to Friday, followed by the three-day-weekend

Another interesting trend that I’ve noticed is that we appear to have two separate daily peaks separated by a couple hours; my guesses are that it is either the west coast and the east coast population centres logging on, or people logging on at work, followed by people logging on at home in the evenings. I’d be grateful if any one could shed some light on this traffic pattern, or to hear from other admins about their own unique traffic patterns.