Visitors Online... ?

OK... I usually see at the bottom of the front page how many people are online. When I visited just now.. it says there are 1,871. SERIOUSLY?

Usually it says somewhere between 200 and 300. I know this depends on the time a little bit.. but i've never seen it so high!

I am really curious. Just how many hits does RS get a day? Do you know what the highest amount of visitors ever was?

(p.s. it's about 1pm EST as I post this).

I just looked at it, and got 2387. :)
Usually they way counters like that work is counting sessions that have been active in the last set time-period.. At least, put really simply..

Dunno why the spike tho, maybe a search-engine doing a scan or soemthing?

Me.

Seems after the crash RS has been very popular.
I noticed a huge influx of viewers back in this thread.

http://www.rubberslug.com/board/showthread.asp?T=365

Nice to see such interest in the galleries!

Actually, yeah. I just noticed my gallery counter, and it's up there. I mean, higher than expected.. Interesting!

Me.

It's weird because I look at my logs and I don't see any obscene traffic from search engines. Search engines are about 5-10% of the traffic.

I have a feeling that some search engine spiders (*cough* I'm talking to you, Inktomi) aren't too bright and sometimes decide to spider the gallery listings in parallel -- simultaneously creating a new visitor at each of the 700 galleries thinking that it's hitting 700 different physical computers.

I'll look into it out of curiosity, but I can tell you that the visitors things counts purely number of different web browsers that hit the site.

Oh, last I checked I think it's anywhere from 40-70k page views a day, depending on the day of the week.