On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
The main driver for many people running their machines 24/7 seems to be the illegal download of movies and TV shows.
When I worked for a Dutch ISP about 10 years ago we noticed a significant number of the ADSL customers leaving their machines on 24*7. At one stage we just assumed that every ADSL customer would be checking POP/IMAP mail all the time because it was a near enough approximation for the busy periods. At that stage speeds such as 128/64 and 512/128 were quite common, downloading TV shows wouldn't have been a good option at such speeds, even if there were sites providing such files.
Many more will turn off their machines simply to save on power usage costs than those that leave them on. You might be surprised how little time some machines run and it wouldn't surprise me if the average in many, if not most homes is lower than 4 hours per day of usage for the general population.
I've just checked the logs for a medium size mail server I run. Yesterday 7.6% of the users checked their mail at least once every hour FROM THE SAME IP ADDRESS for 24 hours. That excluded mobile phones and services like Google Apps (which get different IP addresses). That would also possibly exclude some cable/ADSL customers who are on dynamic IP addresses. Another 2.3% of users checked their mail on 20-23 hours of the day, and another 15% checked their mail on 10-19 hours of the day. A total of 25% of the users checked their mail for more than 10 hours. Now if a computer is online 24 hours a day that doesn't mean that mail will be checked at least once per hour. Some people may have their MUA set with a >60 minute polling time (some people just like to poll manually). Some people just don't have their MUA running all the time. Some people have multi-user computers and log out regularly, for example the log entries for my parents computer will reveal that my mother is online for a while and my father is online for a while. The switch user functionality that was introduced to KDE and GNOME recently (a few years ago) is still rather new, most of my relatives haven't learned to deal with it yet. Note that this is NOT 25% of users who connected on that day doing so for 10 hours or more. This is 25% of the entire user-base. Presumably some of the users are on holiday and have everything shut down. grep perdition.*Auth.*ok mail.log.1|grep -v 127.0.0.1|sed -e s/:..:..\ $HOSTNAME.*Auth:./,/ -e s/:.*authentication_id=\"/,/ -e s/..server=.*$// -e s/^Feb....// | tr [A-Z] [a-z]|grep -v $WEBMAIL|awk -F, '{print $3,$2,$1}'|sort -u |sed -e s/\ ..$//|uniq -c > /tmp/count.txt I used the above command to get a count of users repeatedly using the same IP address to connect via POP and IMAP. $HOSTNAME is the name of the system as used for syslog and $WEBMAIL is the IP address of the webmail server. Then I could just grep the count.txt file to find the number of users who logged in for X hours per day. Thanks to Hannah for the awk advice that helped me get this done. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/