A Sudden Rush
THIS is a subject that has been preying on our minds. Perhaps other sites can attest to the same experience.
As we noted here when GDPR passed, we're purging permanently all site logs after 14 days. The log rotation takes care of that, sans shredding.
Over the past 10 days (10 or so), as media spoke a lot about how GNU/Linux 'exceeded' 4% on desktops/laptops (it was prevalent; we've found more than two dozen), we started noticing a lot more traffic in the news (new) site, news.tuxmachines.org (not the old archives from Drupal and Gallery).
It looks like this (for the new site):
zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.2.gz | wc -l 1150953 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.3.gz | wc -l 1132168 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.4.gz | wc -l 701280 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.5.gz | wc -l 1205868 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.6.gz | wc -l 844998 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.7.gz | wc -l 912513 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.8.gz | wc -l 1223989 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.9.gz | wc -l 1224261 zcat /var/log/apache2/tuxmachines-access.log.10.gz | wc -l 1102660
That last one will get deleted in a few days, but what's noteworthy here is that on average we get over a million requests per day instead of the usual, which was less than half of that.
So what is going on?
Is there growing interest in GNU/Linux? Hours ago we added "Microsoft's testing an idea to promote Bing in Windows 11 - and it's so awful, it makes me want to install Linux (this was published by a faithful Microsoft booster). Chris Titus, another booster of Microsoft, said exactly a month ago that "Microsoft Is Driving Users Away" (that's the title).
Let's hope that there's genuine interest. Google probably can see all the trends (in searches and clicks) and deduce what's going on worldwide, even in Afghanistan. █