[TriLUG] The thin line...

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Andrew Ball wrote:

> ...Also, over 90% of TCP traffic goes through mainframes...

I think it's reasonably safe to call the bluff on that statistic.  
Probably well upwards of 30% of all TCP traffic is HTTP these days*, and 
last time I checked Apache accounts for around 62.52% of all web 
servers, Microsoft products another 30.13%, together around 93%**.  Just 
from looking at the rough numbers there, even if I'm high balling the 
HTTP numbers (probably not by much, if at all), then that's 25%+ that 
isn't touching a main frame at all.  The traffic goes straight from a 
client, likely through some appliance NAT router of theirs, into a cable 
or DSL modem, through an access device at the other end onto Ethernet, 
through a crap-load of routers, and eventually to a switch and some 
random unix/ms server*** on the other end, and back again.  Another 
interesting argument is that I've seen a lot of reports lately that p2p 
traffic is consuming crazy percentages of all internet traffic these 
days, some say as high as 60 to 75%.  I think those are exagerated 
numbers, but I'd believe 40% or more.  I am not even aware of any p2p 
apps for OS360, or anything even resembling a mainframe.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner

* - Alert: Conservative wild flaming guess.  Couldn't easily find any 
trustworthy statistics here.
** - http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
*** - Don't even try the "these are virtual instances on z-series 
mainframes" angle, no way there's any sizable percentage of websites on 
such a platform, see Netcraft again.