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Each D2L Site Broke 25 Million Hits

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Night School is the last time I posted stats here. So this is probably due.

This Yaketystats graph records the daily hits for each site in green and pink. The gray is a total of the two. I had it go back to April first to show our spring load compared to how we are starting this fall.

Each of our Desire2Learn instances broke 25 million hits. Our schools set their own calendars, so start dates ranged from the 12th to the 26th. The amount of activity surged on start dates for the largest schools. A small bump on Wednesday of last week, normally there is a small fall off on Wednesdays, is due to a smaller school’s first day of classes.

The green line has three very large schools (1st, 2nd, 4th) who all started on the 19th. It peaked at 27.59M on the 20th.

The pink line’s bump on the 26th was due to its only very large school starting then. It peaked at 25.61M on the 27th.

Tuesday’s peak could be the highest we get until finals in early December. Since the schools have a Drop/Add period, the first few days are usually slightly higher activity.

Hits From 2013-APR-01 to 2013-AUG-29
Hits From 2013-APR-01 to 2013-AUG-29

Back in April, I saw:

@kfrisch#D2LRUF Reported that MnSCU’s D2L gets 25 million hits a day! We’re the largest self-hosted client of D2L in the United States.

The largest client we have still uses around 70% Blackboard Vista. Their plan is to be all in D2L come January. That should push the green one over the point it is bigger than MnSCU. But even just the normal increase in usage should have the pink one fairly comparable to MnSCU.

We should do something like about a billion hits a month.

I would prefer using a pageview metric. Maybe one of these days when I can make better progress on the to-do list.

Night School

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I noticed a couple weeks back there are interesting spikes in the evening hours of Sunday through Wednesday. Just like morning/afternoon usage, the evening spikes diminish but even more so by comparison.

As I recall for Monday through Wednesday, when I first started, the evening traffic almost flatlined at 5pm and then dropped off at 11pm. Over time the spike has grown to the point we have more users active in the evening than during “business hours”.

In this graph, the numbers across the bottom are the week of the year. The numbers along the left side are the number of users active within the last 5 minutes.

Yaketystats

Really I have no data to say why the change in trend. (We are not 100% online and the majority of the classes we host are supplemental to face-to-face, with hybrid and totally online fighting for second place.) I hope the days of instructors teaching in a computer lab and having students follow along died a hard painful death. If so, then the amount of activity during the day would lessen some. Students and faculty would still go online during the day between classes. However, more student access to broadband at home would empower them to go online more often in the evening and increase the difference between day and evening user activity.

Identifying where each individual IP resides is hard. Doing so for many is more time than I would want to invest in the question. Campus vs. residential vs. corporate is relatively easy. However, “home” for a student could be on campus or residential. Maybe someone else knows better than me.

I guess this means we really ought to look at our automated operations which kick off at 10pm. WebCT recommended they be run when user activity is light or they could impact performance.