Statistics & history

And the traffic?

Back then only requests were counted, not bytes. But with the images from the old cache (0.6 to 17 KB, about 5 KB on average) and the page views, the traffic can be estimated:

Total 2005–2013

≈ 35 TB

Busiest month (August 2005)

≈ 1.1 TB

Requests per second

21 on average, 66 in the busiest month

Every image was freshly drawn by PHP and sent with no-cache, so every forum page loaded it again. No wonder Sloganizer needed a server of its own.

The ten-times bug

The image counter lived in a plain text file. For every image, the PHP script read the number, added one and wrote it back. Except that fgets($datei, 10) reads at most 9 characters. As long as the counter stayed below a billion, that didn't matter.

$datei = fopen("counter_2.txt", "r+");
$counterstand = fgets($datei, 10);   // reads at most 9 characters!
$counterstand++;
rewind($datei);
fwrite($datei, $counterstand);

On 5 December 2005 it reached 1,000,000,000 – ten digits. From then on the script only read the first nine digits, added one and wrote them back. The tenth digit simply stayed where it was, so every image raised the counter by 10 instead of 1, and the statistics jumped overnight from 5 to 53 million images a day.

  999999999   →  999999999 + 1  →   1000000000
 1000000000   →  100000000 + 1  →   1000000010
 1000000010   →  100000001 + 1  →   1000000020
 …
 9999999990   →  999999999 + 1  →   1000000000

At 9,999,999,990, the first nine digits plus one became “1000000000”: the counter fell back to one billion. The daily statistics turned that into minus 9 billion, which doesn't fit into a MySQL integer and was clipped to −2,147,483,648. It happened four times: in June 2006, February 2007, March 2008 and May 2010.

So instead of the roughly 42 billion in the old database, it was a good 5.4 billion slogans. Still quite a lot.