We always enjoy learning how people use Multisite and have heard many stories over the years. Today though we head in the other direction to take a look at how people use Multisite from a statistical point of view. If you’ve ever wondered how your usage compares to that of others this is the article for you!
When you first started running Multisite you were presented with this dialog:
Only if you give permission do we gather anonymous data. We use this information to ensure we support meaningful configurations, understand usage patterns, focus our testing and to be aware of emerging trends.
To put this article together we took data from 608 unique (by IP address) customers pulled from a portion of April 2012.
The first chart looks at what version of Mac OS X people are using with Multisite in April 2012. This information changes (i.e. becomes outdated) fairly rapidly as Apple releases new versions of Mac OS X. From this chart we see that Lion adoption is well underway and that Tiger and Leopard have dropped off significantly.
Multisite Systems by Mac OS Version
Next let’s explore the topic of “how many sites do people manage?”. It turns out there are almost as many answers as people. After slicing and dicing the data we have the following:
Number of Sites Being Managed
From this we see that 6% of Multisite users have a single site, just over 10% are managing 2 sites, 8% are managing 3 sites and so on. Combining everyone with 10 to 19 sites adds up to 19% and finally those with 20 or more sites cumulatively accounts for the final 20% of the population.
The first time we saw this data we realized 39% of people have 10 or more sites and 1 out of 5 people have 20 or more. This discovery made it clear that finding a particular site to work on is tedious for a lot of people. Since the next site they want to work with likely isn’t visible on screen and they’ll have to scroll to get to it. So in Multisite 3.1 we added search to quickly find a site by name as well as keyboard navigation so you don’t have to reach for the mouse to switch your current site – just use the Find (CMD-F), “Tab”, arrows, and the “Return” key for quick mouse free navigation.
Built in Memory
From this we see that 4 GB of memory is the most common and Macs with 8 GB are the next most frequent configuration.
Preferred Languages
Multisite is an English only application. However, by viewing what people have as their preferred language we see that 3 of 4 default to English. Put another way 1 out of every 4 would prefer another language if we were to localize the application.
Wow you’ve made it through the charts and now have a better feel for the stats of Multisite users and their hardware. It was a lot of fun analyzing the data and creating the charts. I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
Clarkwood Blog 
This was really interesting, Elden. It’s terrific to see this data get folded into new features. (It was a surprise to me to see over a third of users with ten or more sites!)