Re: number of machines running Debian?
On Sunday 17 September 2006 04:34, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 17, 2006 at 01:50:51AM +0000, Gustavo Franco wrote:
> > FYI, we had more than 1.2 million web servers (yeah, just web servers)
> > running Debian[0] in 2005.
> >
> > If you add Debian web servers not publishing this information, others
> > servers (2 * 1.2, at least?), desktops, embedded and others (3 * 1.2
> > ?) we've much more than 7.2 million installations running now. Just a
> > guess of course, but i think the exact number is around 10 million.
> >
> > [0] =
> > http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.htm
> >l
>
> I'd say that is *highly* optimistic. The article says "more than 1.2
> million active sites." There is a huge difference between active sites
> and web servers. There are ISPs who manage to server hundreds of web
> sites from one web server. There are also ISPs like SpeakEasy who host
> thousands upon thousands of websites from a web cluster (running Debian)
> which appears like three or four logical hosts to the outside world.
>
> Anyhow, if you are conservative and say 10 sites per web server, then
> you are looking at more like 120,000 actual boxes running Debian to
> server up public web pages.
>
> Regards,
>
> -Roberto
Although popcon has already been discussed, and valid reasons given for the
fact it wouldn't give an accurate total, I think it's worth pointing out that
it would give us a fairly good lower bound on the number of people running
Debian. The only situation I can think of that would skew the figures is if
Debian was installed in virtual machines although in that situation I would
say each install counts as a separate machine. We then need to estimate the
number of machines that don't run popcon. Hopefully that's a task that lends
itself to a better estimation (although it's still hard).
Graham
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