A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”
As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead:
Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:
Looking at yesterday (traffic from 2017-03-08) it was 49,646,154 hits out of 345,005,994 total to our load balancer (about 14.39%) for all (Stack Exchange Network) Q&A site home pages. For Stack Overflow specifically, it was 48,883,541 out of 167,557,603 (about 29.17%).
That total number includes a bit of internal API traffic and we're getting hitting by some unwelcomed scrapers at the moment ... but yeah, it's a non-trivial percentage of traffic these days.
The information generated more than 100 replies, the funniest of which was: “This answer is being closed as off topic.”
If you’d like to see more usage statistics for Stack Overflow and the larger Stack Exchange Network, you’ll find them here. They are quite impressive.
If you’re curious about Stack Overflow’s architecture, Craver has all the info you’ll ever want here.
And, since this was on Reddit, someone offered a link to a somewhat relevant xkcd comic.