How much traffic is high-traffic

Question

My primary interest is in gathering information about the technology used behind public facing websites. Much of the information I read arbitrarily differentiates between high-traffic vs the unstated non-high-traffic websites. This troubles me because I don't have a good grasp of how much traffic is high-traffic.

Can anyone help me with this, is there a good rule of thumb?

Please don't tell me it depends ;)

Well, it does depend... it depends on who's writing the document you're reading. You really have to ask them what they mean by high vs. "non-high" traffic. There is no technical definition of this term--and the meaning of the term is likely to change over time. — Flimzy, Jun 28 '11 at 16:13
It would be extremely helpful if you gave a specific reason for closing the question. I find it arrogant. — Jack, Jun 28 '11 at 17:00
I didn't vote to close your question, but the reason is given in the closed notice: "It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form." I think my comment above, and the three answers give plenty of other clues as well: Your question is essentially un-answerable. It's far too subjective, vague, and broad. I don't think it's arrogant at all. Perhaps you could re-ask, with a SPECIFIC question. — Flimzy, Jun 28 '11 at 17:13
@Flimzy: My previous comment was not directed at you, but at those who closed it. I appreciate the comment you previously wrote. — Jack, Jun 28 '11 at 17:35

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 28 '11 at 16:15

It Depends
No, seriously - there is no straight cut-and-dry answer for this question.

Constantly transferring multiple gigabytes every minute? That's high-traffic.

Constantly handling several million requests per second? That's high-traffic.

A perfume retailer's site that gets one request a day... except the week before Mother's Day and St. Valentine's Day? That's high-traffic, even if the average over the year is decidedly low-traffic.

The best definition I can give you is that "High Traffic" is the point at which:

You start to worry about bandwidth limitations
You start to worry about your infrastructure (hardware/software/network) keeping up with the load.
You know that an outage will cause enough noise that it will be a problem (customers notice and complain)
(this one is also the beginning of the definition for "Business Critical"…)

@vorataq7: Thank you for answering, this helps. – Jack Jun 28 '11 at 17:05 — Jack, Jun 28 '11 at 17:05

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 28 '11 at 16:14

0

Oh boy, somebody is using fancy words.

Your question has more buzz words then the actual context, and yes it depends what you are serving.

High traffic for a file hosting site might be measured in outgoing bandwidth, high traffic for a regular web site might be measured in requests/p seconds, etc.

answered Jun 28 '11 at 16:14

Aleksey Korzun

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Seriously, I cannot find a single buzz word in my question. I'm convinced you're confusing two questions, mine and another. – Jack Jun 28 '11 at 17:02

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 28 '11 at 16:21

Quantcast keeps track of the traffic received by a large fraction of the sites on the internet. The top 100 sites listing should give you a good ballpark estimate of the amount of traffic that these sites receive.

Note: in the interest of full disclosure, I work for Quantcast, but this particular resource is relevant to this question.

How much traffic is high-traffic

3 Answers3