I noticed a couple weeks back there are interesting spikes in the evening hours of Sunday through Wednesday. Just like morning/afternoon usage, the evening spikes diminish but even more so by comparison.

As I recall for Monday through Wednesday, when I first started, the evening traffic almost flatlined at 5pm and then dropped off at 11pm. Over time the spike has grown to the point we have more users active in the evening than during “business hours”.

In this graph, the numbers across the bottom are the week of the year. The numbers along the left side are the number of users active within the last 5 minutes.

Really I have no data to say why the change in trend. (We are not 100% online and the majority of the classes we host are supplemental to face-to-face, with hybrid and totally online fighting for second place.) I hope the days of instructors teaching in a computer lab and having students follow along died a hard painful death. If so, then the amount of activity during the day would lessen some. Students and faculty would still go online during the day between classes. However, more student access to broadband at home would empower them to go online more often in the evening and increase the difference between day and evening user activity.

Identifying where each individual IP resides is hard. Doing so for many is more time than I would want to invest in the question. Campus vs. residential vs. corporate is relatively easy. However, “home” for a student could be on campus or residential. Maybe someone else knows better than me.

I guess this means we really ought to look at our automated operations which kick off at 10pm. WebCT recommended they be run when user activity is light or they could impact performance.