[JosephRedfern]

Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year.

6310241024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!

[porges]

Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath... [This page is 3,780 bytes.]

In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac...

This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable.

So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May).

Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!

[ejol]

Why would you interpret 3 599 Mbytes as 3.599, and not as 3599 Mbytes? 3599MB/728506 = 4.95 kB (assuming 1000 kB in an MB).

[porges]

Because that seems to be what the person who came up with the "63 MB" figure has done.

[logicallee]

it reads as if by order of magnitude jump you mean "megabyte to gigabyte" but (obviously, now that I point it out) that is 3 orders of magnitude jump!

[hobofan]

I think he is correct. An order of magnitude change for (most) SI units is a change by a factor of 10, while it is a change by a factor of 1024 for bytes.