On 12/6/20 7:30 PM, Roman Danyliw wrote:
Relationship between FTP and HTTP traffic volume seems irrelevant. Again, traffic volume is not an indicator of importance. So why keep citing it?I keep citing the HTTP numbers because they provide context to the FTP numbers.
I don't think they do, because IMO FTP and HTTP provide different
services and probably for different user communities - FTP more
for active IETF participants or "expert users" vs. HTTP for the
whole world of RFC users.
To use an analogy, I wouldn't expect the traffic to the IETF tools pages to be of the same order of magnitude as to the HTTP pages serving RFCs either. A significantly lower traffic volume for the tools pages wouldn't make the IETF tools pages seem any less useful, wouldn't be justification for deprecating them.
I will say upfront that I don't know the entire population size of "active IETF participants". However, if we say that all 91, or even 140, IP addresses seen in FTP (let's include the search engines) are active IETF users.
Just to clarify my concern about the sampling period, does 91
users in 12 days imply only 91 users total, or is the number small
because the sampling interval is so short? Would the number of
users in a year be closer to 91 total or more like 91 * (365/12)
(around 2768), or somewhere in between? While I think 91 total
active users of the FTP site is probably enough to justify
continuing to support it, in my mind 2768 users in a year
certainly does.
I assume that the IETF servers exist at least partially, even
primarily, to facilitate the standards development work of IETF,
and the people actively doing the work are relatively few.
I see no reason why not to also count the >500,000 IP addresses that used HTTP as active IETF participants (see Section 2 of the "12 Days in the life ..." charts). Comparing 140 to >500,000 doesn't seem to align with calling this number a "significant fraction" (as its 0.02%).
IMO you are comparing dissimilar things because the two aren't
equivalent services, and the FTP service supports useful
operations that the HTTP service doesn't.
Keith
