Usage Statistics

The following are graphs showing the number of active users and the server load on one of the five frontline access servers in the MSU production cluster in the fall semester of 2003. In that semester we had over 13,000 student course enrollments, which corresponded to 9,250 individual learners.

• An "active user" is not only logged in to the system, but has also been interacting with it within the last half hour.
• This is one of five load-balancing machines. If the machine has 100 active users, the system is serving a total of approximately 500 learners.
• A server-load of "2" should be considered 100 percent load on these dual-processor machines.

The user and server load on the library server is somewhat more complex.

Whole Semester

The following graph shows the complete semester. Peak workload on the machine is 2.3, peak number of active users is approximately 200, which means that 1,000 learners at MSU were actively working on the system at the time - approximately 1/9th of the total number of individual users.

One Week in September

The following graph shows one week in September. September 21st was a Sunday. Peak usage was around 600 active users. Saturday is the day with the least active users.

One Day in September

The following is the data for September 25th, which was a Thursday. Learners are not very active between 5:30 and 8am, peak worktime was around 10pm with around 600 active users.