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Survey results for Sympa usages

During november 2006, we ask to sympa users to answer a survey because, as project leader, we need to have a good view of who is using Sympa and what are the usage of this application and what should we focus on.

Many thanks those of you who answer.


FIXME (plugin note)

126 users answers to this survey. We known the polled a cross-section of the Sympa users may not reflex perfectly the real profile of the total population.

:survey:users-institution.png

How long are you using Sympa
less than 1 year (1) 19.05%
1 to 2 years 15.08%
2 to 3 years 11.11%
3 to 4 years 21.43%
4 to 5 years 8.73%
more than 5 years 24.60%

The answers show that Sympa users population is still growing.

CVS0.00%
5.3aX 3.17%
5.2 35.71%
5.1 23.02%
5.0 2.38%
4.X 26.19%
older version 6.35%
No answer3.17%

We were surprised that nobody uses the CVS version. 2/3 of the installed versions are 5.X but there are still many old versions running. Most are installed from tarball (including some home made .deb orb .rpm). Binaries distribution seems marginal unless for debian. We really need better package. We will not procude them ourself. Contributors are welcome !

linux / debian 34.92%
linux / redhat 26.19%
linux / fedora 3.97%
linux / suze 3.17%
linux / mandriva 0.79%
Linux / other distrib 8.73%
solaris11.11%
freeBSD 7.94%
macOs X 0.79%
No answer0.79%
aix0.00%
other1.59%

The reasons why Sympa is choosen are mainly :

  • because of it's rich web interface
  • because of LDAP integration (mainly authentication)
  • because of internationalization
  • because it is much more better than mailman, majordomo or listserv
  • because of external data source as definition of subscribers set
  • because of S/MIME integration
  • because of virtual host support

Of course we would like also to known “whay you did not choose Sympa but unfortunitly this question can't be part of such survey.

number of lists number of virtual robots bigest lists numbers of registred subscribers
average 739 4.5 12.672 58.882
max 24.000 235 200.000 430.000
MySQL 84.92%
PostgreSQL 11.90%
Oracle 1.59%
other0.79%
o answer0.79%
Sybase0.00%
SQL-Lite0.00%
no RDBMS at all with my Sympa0.00%

Great ! Nobody seems to use the old file style backend which is not supported anymore without big bugs. The other new information is that MySQL and postgrSQL are the main.

A very poor number of users uses more than one server in order to provide Sympa services. Thoses who are doing this does it for shigh-availability and security issues ; only one does it for load balancing. This mean that it is raisonnable to run a list server on a single server. Sympa does not consume so much server ressources.

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  • Last modified: 2006/12/05 13:43
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