2009-02-04

Why did they do this?

Sometimes I can present numbers, but I don’t have an explanation. Yesterday was the official launch of the 4.0 Skype version. The (40 hours) graph below shows the concurrent users online (red curve) with the typical fluctuations over a 24 hours span and the ever rising download curve (blue curve).However, the speed of the downloads seems to have lowered suddenly and dramatically from about 600 downloads per minute to 250 per minute during a 30 hours time span and back to more than 520 downloads per minute (see the blue dotted arrows that I drew on the screenshot). The change was sudden and unexpected, therefore this was induced by Skype.

Strange also that this happened at a time that we would expect an increase in downloads!
  • Could it be that the counting system was temporarily flawed?
  • Did they shut down some of their download servers?
I don’t have any clue!

And ... since quite a lot of days, the RSS feed of concurrent users online doesn't work anymore: it shows 0 (zero) concurrent users online! Another flaw?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll try to find out why the online user figure isn't displayed in that feed - I'll let you know as soon as I know more :)

Jean Mercier said...

Thanks Peter!