I am a huge fan of OperaMini and about a year ago, I reported on the usage statistics published by Opera over at their website. While they report their usage statistics once per month, I haven't been over in a while and I was quite possitively surprised when I compare their current report to that I have reported on a year ago. Here are the points I've taken away from the comparison:
- Compared to a year ago, the active user base has increased from 11.9 million users worldwide to 20 million users. So it's almost doubled in a year.
- Number of transcoded pages: 7.5 billion, up from 2.4 billion a year ago. so while the user base has doubled, consumption has trippled. Looks like the per person appetite is rising.
- The amount of data sent to users: 122.00.000 MB during the month, that's almost 4x more than a year ago. So not only do users view more pages but the content per page is also growing. A year ago, I calculated their outgoing average data rate at around 100 MBit/s. At the current usage, their average outgoing data rate must now be close to 400 MBit/s. In addition, there's the traffic for fetching the full web page in the first place and then compressing it to those average 400 MBit/s output. It's difficult to say how much bandwidth that requires due to caching but I'd say its very significant as well.
From what I've heard, Opera has a number of regional data centers now in the US and China, so the overall load is split now. Still, the number is staggering.
For this post, let's do another rough guess: With 7.5 billion pages served a month, that's 250 million pages a day, or almost 2900 pages a second.
All very impressive!