Re: Postgres mail list traffic over time

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
>>> I also was confused by its flatness. I am finding the email traffic
>>> almost impossible to continue tracking, so something different is
>>> happening, but it seems it is not volume-related.
>> Yes, my perception also is that it's getting harder and harder to keep
>> up with the list traffic; so something is happening that a simple
>> volume count doesn't capture.

If measured in "bytes of the gzipped mbox" it looks like there's a
*huge* increase of volume on Hackers in the past 3 months - well
over twice the historical levels; and maybe 4X 2002-2006.

Graphs of this metric can be seen here:

http://0ape.com/postgres_mailinglist_size/

In some ways I think compressed mbox sizes are a more fair way
of measuring the bandwidth for these lists since it (correctly)
counts a large gzipped path as requiring more mental effort than
people top-posting brief messages on top of old threads.

(Data from commands like
HEAD http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/mbox/pgsql-hackers.2008-09.gz | grep Content-Length
)