[Plplot-devel] "State of our Statistics" Address or Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Our statistics area at sourceforge shows there were supposedly 1200
downloads of plplot on October 16th.  I am frankly at a loss to explain this
huge number (10-20 downloads per day is more normal), and there doesn't seem
to be any abnormality in the file download area statistics that is
consistent with 1200 extra downloads of one of the files there.  At one
point I went into paranoid mode and checked out other sourceforge projects
to see whether SF had been subject to a denial-of-service attack.  But no
other project I have looked at has such a huge one-day spike in their
download numbers.

Anyhow, if you see these pumped up download numbers for plplot in October, I
suspect they are not real.  We typically get about 70 downloads/month for
yplot and 600 downloads per month (ignoring October) for plplot.  An
interesting comparison is that gnuplot also gets about 600 downloads per
month.  Of course it is two years since they have made an official release.
Their cvs is reasonably active so I wouldn't be surprised to see another
gnuplot release soon, and a corresponding surge in their monthly download
rate.

Of course I am hoping for a surge in our download rates when 5.1.0 comes
out.  Ain't competition fun?  ;-)

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
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