GfxBench2D's Traffic Spike

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

I haven't posted to this blog in a long while, so I thought that I would share some interesting traffic data related to the newest section of the website. Just over a month ago I released GfxBench2D, a 2D benchmarking tool and web-application. This tool measures 2D graphics performance and can (optionally) upload results to this website for display. Well, this triggered the biggest traffic spike that this website has ever seen. Take a look a graph of the number of daily visits that have occurred since this website was first created (up to 10 July 2011):

As you can see, it dwarfs the next highest traffic spike, which coincided with the announcement that compositing support for Radeon HD 2000-4000 cards had been added to the RadeonHD driver. Not only did it dwarf all previous traffic spikes, but it was also the first spike not generated by the RadeonHD driver project (the first spike was the very first entry to the RadeonHD Development Log). The crazy thing is that this spike in traffic could have been even higher if I had submitted the news simultaneously to the various AmigaOS related forums. I deliberately staggered the news posts to spread the traffic out over several days. The graph of unique visitors follows the same pattern. Clearly, GfxBench2D appeals to a lot more people than than the Radeon HD driver project does despite only an AmigaOS 4.x version of the tool being available.

The effect of GfxBench2D's release becomes even more pronounced when looking at the number of page-views per day:

Not only did more visitors check out GfxBench2D than any of the RadeonHD development log posts, but they also collectively viewed more pages while they were here. This difference comes as no surprise. While all of the RadeonHD development log posts are well contained within a single page, the GfxBench2D section provides pages and pages of results (182 results at present) to examine. As a result, visitors tended to browse through the available benchmark data instead of reading a single page and then leaving.

The final thing that is noticeable in the graphs above is the slow but relatively consistent rise in traffic to this website. This is a trend that I hope will continue or, preferably, will be able to accelerate.

Comments (1) | 21 July 2011