"nobody uses weasyl", except for the 5000 users who hit it, per day

[Pi]

FA's active users over a day (graphed by an external source):


Weasyl has two graphs:


My interpretation of these graphs is that Weasyl only has 500 or so visitors per hour, but across a day, it's a different 500 users, leading up to a total of 5000 unique viewers a day. Hey, look, they're already competitive with FA.

[GreenReaper]

I think you're confusing the data behind the FA graph, which measures "online users" - that is, those active within the last hour (or possibly less; they don't say), and so comparing two different things - Weasyl's daily users with FA's peak active users.

It would be reasonable to assume that FA has a similar pattern of use. If so, then we need to compare peak usage. On Weasyl it is 800 registered users, while on FA it is 9000. This suggests that FA is roughly 11 times busier member-wise than Weasyl, at around 55,000 registered users in a day. (FA also appears to have a higher proportion of guest traffic, even accounting for the graph scaling and y-position.)

Inkbunny doesn't provide graphs, but the stats page shows over 15,000 active members per day (peak hourly users goes up to around 1,700-1,800). SoFurry does not provide activity statistics, but third-party traffic graphs show it roughly as active as Inkbunny. Neither is close to FA's traffic level yet (e621 is far closer, but a different kind of site), and Weasyl is about two to three times less active than IB or SF.

However, the fandom is large, and all sites are "competitive" in the sense that each has members who are choosing to use it as their primary gallery. Inkbunny was at Weasyl's traffic level a few years ago, so they just have to build on what they have. An uncompetitive site would be the VCL, which retains just a few active users despite its submission base.

[Pi]

I think you're confusing the data behind the FA graph, which measures "online users" - that is, those active within the last hour (or possibly less; they don't say), and so comparing two different things - Weasyl's daily users with FA's peak active users.

It would be reasonable to assume that FA has a similar pattern of use. If so, then we need to compare peak usage. On Weasyl it is 800 registered users, while on FA it is 9000. This suggests that FA is roughly 11 times busier member-wise than Weasyl, at around 55,000 registered users in a day. (FA also appears to have a higher proportion of guest traffic, even accounting for the graph scaling and y-position.)

Cool! now do these graphs!


(it should be obvious which of these isn't weasyl's, because the subtle difference stands RIGHT OUT to GreenReaper)

[GreenReaper]

Well, the top one's using an entirely different version of Munin to the one specified here, so it's probably not the same machine.

If I had to pick one as being Weasyl I'd go with the bottom one, which at least has a reasonable amount of memory (all the rest are 1GB, perhaps VMs?), and also shows evidence of a backup operation (increase in slab_cache and buffers) during a time when Weasyl is least likely to be active (early morning U.S. time). I see a similar pattern on IB.

Of course, this could be a trick question - the 1GB servers might be secondary servers for Weasyl. You don't need much to host a status site, or development tools. I wouldn't be too surprised if the old Weasyl server had 1Gb, either.

The "subtle difference" with the FA graph was that its time distribution matched Weasyl's sessions over 1h graph, not its 1d graph.

[Pi]

All three of the older-Munin ones are Weasyl servers...

[GreenReaper]

... but only one of them is serving 5000 4000 members a day, right?

I'm not sure what the point of this discussion is. No, graphs are not the be-all and end-all, but you can tell some things from them.  Weasyl is not going to kill FA any time soon, but it's built up its own community and it can grow from there, like other sites have.

I suggest Weasyl's developers use the time productively, lest the site find itself faced by FA-style scaling issues later in its life. Inkbunny certainly has areas which could be improved (and I'll be writing about them in due course, elsewhere).

Merry Christmas, by the way. I'll save the happy new year for FC.

[Fantastigasm]

No one uses Weasyl.