OSM usage by the public?

General talk
1

Where would be the best place to look for and see OSM usage by the public? For example, how many user sessions per day on osm.org? How many api request sessions by external applications?

Would adding up established connections (ipconntrack) from Munin for puff and fuchur be an indicator of number of users at any given time for the slippy map? That would give around 40K connections on the system at any one time and it correlates with the “connections through firewall” stat. I cant really make sense of the HTTP request breakdown stat called “web site traffic”.

Another approach would be to look at the tile server. But would active, passive or established connections be the stat to look at? It greatly differs from puff and fuchur with aroud 628 established connections on average. Which one is best?

And still, that gives no indication on the number of unique visitors to the site.

Alexa places the site 8th in the “maps” category (http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Reference/Maps) but still no info on unique visitors.

Any ideas?

I find the project great and have been contributing to it, but it would be great to know how much it’s used with some form of analytics.

Louis

2

I don’t think the stats of “unique visitors” is currently available. The data you have already listed is the closest you can currently get. But non of those are particularly great, as each “unique visitor” will result in many requests to both the tileserver and webserver.

The tileserver is furthermore used in a variety of other websites and blogs for displaying maps and only about 25% (in March) of tiles originate from requests from www.openstreetmap.org

The HTTP request breakdown as far as I know, lists the current number of active sessions for a given type. However, without knowing how long a request took, it is hard to get the number or requests processes per day out of that. The Webtraffic part is basically everything non-api.

On top of that, the number of visitors that come to OSM.org is not necessarily a great representation of how many people use openstreetmap data, as many people will get their data through other sites, like e.g. open.mapquest.co.uk, maps.bing.com, cloudmade.com, skobbler.com or through devices like garmins, just to name a few external sites using OSM data.