Hi all,
As you may know, already around one year ago, Gramps Web has introduced anonymized telemetry that does nothing more than send a completely anonymous ID to an analytics endpoint at most once a day to allow the Gramps Web developers to monitor the approximate number of Gramps Web installations.
Due to our choice of making this maximally anonymous (no IP, version info, or info about tree is sent), it’s not easy to interpret this data. This is compounded by two facts,
- Telemetry is opt-out and we have no idea which fraction of users do opt out of it
- Telemetry is not sent at regular intervals, but only when a request is made and it hasn’t been sent in the last 24 hours. Consequently, installations that are not accessed do not send a ping.
What is quite clear from the data is that
- Many installations are accessed infrequently
- The vast majority of installations only has a single tree
Now of course, it would be really interesting to answer the question: Is Gramps Web the web’s leading online collaborative genealogy platform? (Stealing Webtree’s self-advertisement punchline just for fun 
)
The Webtrees project publishes their own statistics and currently has around 8400 active servers seen in the last 30 days.
However, this number is not directly comparable to ours because a) Webtrees servers send daily pings regardless of usage and b) Webtrees telemetry is not opt-out as far as I know (it uses the updater’s server requests).
Nevertheless, here are some Gramps Web numbers for a current 30 day period.
- Number of servers that have been used on at least 2 days in a 30 day window (i.e., definitely active installations): around 1650.
- Number of servers that have been used on at least 2 days in the last year, of which at least one was in the last 30 days (i.e., definitely real installations and in occasional use): around 2600.
- Number of unique servers that have been seen at least once in the last 30 days: around 4900.
It’s hard to say what those large numbers mean - thousands of servers that are only seen on a single day. Speculation:
- Test installations that are thrown away
- Incorrectly configured installations where the server UUID is not persisted and changes in every ping
So, what is the real number of Gramps Web installations in the world? It’s pure speculation, as we don’t know the fraction of users opting out of telemetry. But it’s definitely well above 2000 installations and could be a factor of 2-5x larger.
We also see around 20 new installations popping up each day. Let’s see where that goes.
PS: I have huge respect for the webtrees project, so comparing to their numbers is not because I want to win a race. Nevertheless, it’s intereting to see that our user base is probably roughly of the same order of magnitude.