From: Christophe.Wolfhugel@grasp.insa-lyon.fr (Christophe Wolfhugel)
Newsgroups: news.lists
Subject: Usenet article size statistics -- October 92
Followup-To: news.admin.misc
Date: 7 Nov 1992 17:00:38 +0100
Organization: INSA Informatique (Grasp), Lyon, France
NNTP-Posting-Host: grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr
Summary: statistical study of usenet articles
Keywords: article, statistics, size


Following statistics have been done using all 131959 articles having
transited on my node during the month of October 1992.

UUNET is also publishing a bi-weekly article size distribution
study to news.lists, but not yet with the per group details.

The sampled feed is far away from a full feed. The only binary
groups received are vmsnet. No pictures. No other binaries.

The sampled feed contains: news, comp (!sources,!binaries), misc.jobs,
bionet, vmsnet plus some other groups and some regional hierarchies
(about 300 groups total).


Number of articles received:           131959 articles
Smallest article received:                256 bytes
Largest article received:              343787 bytes
Average article size:                    2134 bytes
Standard deviation:                      4665 bytes

Article size       #        %       T#       T%
------------------------------------------------
0-499            1731     1.31     1731     1.31
500-999         31797    24.10    33528    25.41
1000-1999       66451    50.36    99979    75.77
2000-4999       26785    20.30   126764    96.07
5000-9999        2897     2.20   129661    98.27
10000-24999      1260     0.95   130921    99.22
25000-49999       683     0.52   131604    99.74
50000+            355     0.26   131959   100.00

Following in an estimation of the "contents" of all sampled articles.

Number of articles sampled:        131959 articles

Field              Kb     %hdr    %nohdr
----------------------------------------
Kbytes:      274953.72   100.00   ---.--
Headers:     102851.02    37.41   ---.--
Body:        172102.70    62.59   100.00
Useful:      148267.35    53.92    86.15
Signatures:    9144.75     3.33     5.31
Quoting:      14690.59     5.34     8.54

Total top level domains:         150 (so many badly configured sites)

Sorted by size of articles posted...

     User address                               #msg       #kb    %sig  %quote
001. edu (1)                                   48339  105294.25    4.3    6.9
002. com (2)                                   32794   67603.92    5.8   10.3
003. ca (3)                                     6293   12877.18    4.8    8.2
004. uucp (4)                                   5681   10301.84    6.0   10.9
005. org (5)                                    4556   10280.66    6.2    6.7
006. au (7)                                     4744    9438.14    5.3   13.4
007. de (6)                                     4131    8343.79    6.4   12.4
008. uk (8)                                     4417    7859.74    6.1    9.2
009. gov (9)                                    2325    5068.23    8.2    6.7
010. nl (-)                                     1795    3865.08    7.8   14.2
[...]

#msg   =   number of messages
#kb    =   size in kilobytes
%sig   =   percentage of (recognized) signatures
%quote =   percentage of (recognized) quoting.

The number in parenthesis, when present, indicates the rank of the
domain last month.

The complete set of data (one file per group and hierarchy or sub hierarchy
received here) is available either by anonymous ftp or listserv, and by
gopher (server: gopher.univ-lyon1.fr, port 70).

By anonymous ftp to grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr in /pub/usenet-stats, the file
'all' represents the global summary, 'news' for news.*, news.answers for
news.answers, ...

By listserv, send mail to listserv@grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr with commands in
the BODY of the message (not the subject!). Commands can be:

index usenet-stats              (approx. 30 Kb long message).
get usenet-stats group

Exemples:   get usenet-stats news
            get usenet-stats news.answers

Following algorithm has been used, it is far far away from being a good
one, but the results seem acceptable:

- headers are counted up to the first newline.

- signatures are counted from line '-- '. So exotic signatures are bypassed.

- default quote char is '>', if "In article" is encountered at a start
  of line, the quote char is set to one of <>:|%!.+~ on the first list
  it is encountered.

- top-level domains are determined from the part after the last dot in
  the address part, this is an interesting part as it allows to see
  some misconfigured sites, also, bang path addresses generate strange
  outputs. Some non standards lines have already been deleted by the
  statistics software.


Disk occupation statistics
--------------------------

These data indicates the disk usage of the articles on several
systems, depending on the block size.

All articles received in October have been included in this sample.

Sampled volume: 281539087 bytes (268.5 Mb)

Block size   #kb used   #kb lost    %       System name
-------------------------------------------------------
   512        308067     33126    10.8      [ Put here
  1024        339277     64336    19.0        your
  2048        397204    122263    30.8      favorite
  4096        610312    335371    55.0      system name ]

Conlusion: get small blocking factors to save disk!

-- 
Christophe Wolfhugel    |    Email: Christophe.Wolfhugel@grasp.insa-lyon.fr
   "No keyboard, press F1 to continue"
Newsgroups: news.lists