Jan 20 2011 - Web Traffic in 2010

Significant Events

As well as Darfield, other events during 2010 that caused significant web traffic were the Chilean tsunami and various smaller earthquakes. During one of the strongly felt Darfield aftershocks, traffic to the website topped out at over 11,600 requests per second (on a one minute average).

Understanding the Numbers

Not all of the requests to the web site are caused by people using browsers to look at web pages. Many of the requests (typically around 40% or more) are by people using our web services and our subscriptions (e.g, RSS feeds) to retrieve data, such as earthquake locations in other formats (e.g., KML, GML, QuakeML) and to create other representations of GeoNet data. It's great to see the creative re-use of data happening, especially where it puts the events into better context for a specific group of users. It's a testament to the open GeoNet data policy.

We also spend a lot of time optimizing the website. Each web page comprises a number of "objects" such as images and stylesheets, each of which has an overhead in terms of load on our servers. So we work hard to keep the number of requests per page and the size of each requested object down. This means faster page loads for you. An independent survey ranked the GeoNet website second overall for the most optimised home page of the Top 100 websites based in New Zealand! You can read the full results at ProjectX Technology.

Other Traffic

Throughout the year we have served many terabytes of basic data to researchers in New Zealand and overseas. We also exchange data continuously in real time with international agencies such as the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC, based in Honolulu, Hawaii) and the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) of the United States Geological Survey.

We maintain a number of internal web sites for the GeoNet Duty Officers and emergency managers as well as automatically sending SMS messages, faxes, and pager messages to keep all the responders informed. In September 2010 alone we sent 44,653 SMS messages - and that was just earthquake notifications. Unfortunately we do not have a $10 deal for that!

In summary, the Darfield earthquake and its aftershocks has been a huge opportunity for us to measure ourselves against a real, consequential event. Yet as we become more well-known, the demand just keeps going up. So we will continue to keep abreast of the best ways to serve you information, and to support that with robust infrastructure.