As I've seen some confusion about our stats lately, I decided to write a little explanatory column. The following is just boring technical stuff.

Usercounts

I picked these graphs off of the NetSplit website, an excellent site that keeps track of all the irc networks in the world (all the ones I ever heard about at least, and more).

My enterpretation of these graphs are as follow:

A. This is easter holiday each spring, people vacate and doesnt spend so much time in front of their computers.

B. Summerholiday. Same as Eastern, but in a larger scale. Starts in the middle of June and lasts until the start of August.

C. Christmas holiday. Since Santa isnt on QuakeNet you'll have to go offline to get your presents.

D. Each of these downpeaks represent friday and saturday in a week, which are the days where we have dramatically less users than the other nights (10-20% less).

The usercount during the day isnt shown here, but a typical day looks like this:

01:08 : 55562

04:08 : 46593

07:08 : 49014

10:08 : 64854

13:08 : 82976

16:08 : 93182

19:08 : 101119

22:08 : 77164

(Taken from netsplit too (thanks netsplit), times are in GMT (I think)).

Ranging from 45k to 100k users during the day. Peak is around 20:00. It is worth noticing that QuakeNet's users are mainly from europe (a count of the domains the users come from proves this), other networks can then be approximately geographically located userbase wise, by looking at their peaktime (here assuming that their userbase is similiar to that of QuakeNet).

Channelcounts

This graph represents the channels created on QuakeNet. Two things are worth noticing:

A. On the 7th of May this year, we introduced our new channelservice L. As L is free to get to any channel that you own (see previous columns for explanation), our channelcount started growing rapidly at that point.

B. As our two channelservices gets added to a lot of channels all the time, some are of cause also abandoned. We regularly clean up the databases of the two channelservices to weed out unused channels and accounts, and these downpeaks each represent a database cleanup. At the start of August a new feature was introduced, that makes L autopart channels which has been empty for a day (this wont deregister the channel, just make L leave temporarily). This has lessened the load on the ircd's.

Resources used

Q

Q currently uses about 300MB Ram, and 6-10% cpu (on a PIII-800). On top of this Q logs to a MySQL database, which takes about 130-150MB Ram, depending on the time of day. A total of 450MB Ram.

Q currently is registered on 25k channels, and has 210k registered users (a user expires when unused for 40 days).

L

L currently uses 50MB Ram, and 0% cpu (on a PIII-550). L does not use a database.

L currently is registered on 65k channels, and has 195k registered users (a subset of Q's users).

It should be pretty obvious why we would like people to use L instead of Q most places.

Ircd

The ircd's take about 140-200MB Ram each, ranging from leaf-servers in the low end, to hubs in the high end.

Bandwidth usage varies during the day, but averages at 512kbit-1Mbit for a leaf server, with highest continious usage in the evening at about 2-3Mbit. Burstsize is typically about 15-20MB, which has to be transfered as fast as possible during netmerges.

Upcoming improvements

Q is currently being rewritten from scratch in a new framework that'll hold a bunch of services, including Proxyscan, Trojanscan (these two are allready implemented) and the full featured channelservice Q. The current Q is in no danger of being overloaded the first couple of years due to L taking quite a load off of it.

L is considered done, and only minor improvements will be done on it (we consider implementing topic preservation into it for example). The rewrite of Q is not planned to replace L.

The next version of ircu (2.10.11) is currently being patched to have the same features as the previous patched version of ircu (lain, a patch for 2.10.10). Ircu 2.10.11 implements a new network code, which is expected to double the capacity of the existing servers. Also, a lot of servers are considering expanding their current servers.

Thanks for your time.

Rasmus aka. 'MnO-Bigfoot'