Mercury transit webcams

[Whitters]

http://www.eso.org/outreach/eduoff/vt-2004/mt-2003/mt-display.html

[Rick]

Thanks for that. I was able to watch a bit of the transit despite bein in bed with the 'flu.

Interestingly, http://www.eso.org/outreach/eduoff/vt-2004/vt-links.html has a link to the OAS page on the 2004 Venus transit. Seems to have been good for an extra 20Mb of hits on the OAS site yesterday....

[Ian]

interesting we got a link. Who's our mole at ESO then?

[Rick]

Probably someone googling....

[Ian]

well "transit of venus" brings us up 4th. Not bad for no real effort

[Rick]

Eeep! Bandwidth usage has gone up a bit. Summary from the last few days:

Sat May 3 2003, 868 Requests, totalling 7 MB
Sun May 4 2003, 1036 Requests, totalling 11 MB
Mon May 5 2003, 2005 Requests, totalling 20 MB
Tue May 6 2003, 3533 Requests, totalling 31 MB
Wed May 7 2003, 6566 Requests, totalling 76 MB

The number of requests counts all the img tags  (which is why it's so large). Hope the trend doesn't continue too far, or the site might get pushed to a slower server....

[ This Message was edited by: Rick on 2003-05-08 08:42 ]

[Ian]

looks like we may need to keep an eye on this. At what point do you see demon having an issue with us?

[Rick]

So long as we don't have more than seven days like yesterday (over 60Mb but less than 150Mb per day) in a month we'll be Ok. However, if we get more than seven, or if we get one where it goes over 150Mb then we could end up on the slow server for a while.

The gory details are here:

http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/products/homepages/bwusage.shtml

[Rick]

It's worth noting that a lot of ISPs do something like this, but they're not always quite so open about it....

[Sue]

Could someone explain if the number of requests mean hits on our web site? Does bandwidth usage refer to many simultanious hits or sum of interest in the site over a day? I'm still a computer novice!

[Rick]

The number of requests is a count of all the bits that have been requested, including all the images. Loading the main OAS page once would add about 25 to that figure because of the images that get loaded as well.

The bandwidth figure is the sum of the sizes of all the things sent. The entire OAS site currently fits into less than 6Mb, so the 76Mb might represent a dozen people each looking at everything on the OAS site, or more likely a larger number of people each looking at a few pages.

In this case I think the 2004 Venus Transit page, which is directly linked from that page on the ESO site, is the most likely target. Its 26 components take about 430Kb so that 76Mb could be 175 people just looking at that page. More likely, it's a smaller number of people each looking at the Venus page and maybe some of the rest of the site.

Now that the transit is over I expect the hit rate to drop.

[ This Message was edited by: Rick on 2003-05-08 18:19 ]

[Sue]

Thanks for the explaination.Great that there is so much interest. Perhaps we will gain some new members on the back of it!

Hope that you are feeling better

[Rick]

It's tailing off, so I'm fairly sure the ESO link is the one that was pushing traffic our way:

Thu May 8 2003, 5306 Requests, totalling 48 MB
Fri May 9 2003, 2305 Requests, totalling 23 MB

[ This Message was edited by: Rick on 2003-05-10 09:43 ]