Pachube.com: visualising 24 hours of API requests

We now have Pachube feeds and users from every continent on the planet - but we've been wondering just how much cross-planet traffic we're generating. We know we're getting many 10s of thousands of API requests per hour, but are Pachube feeds localised (requesting each other from geographically close neighbourhoods)? Or are we really doing what we set out to do: facilitate "patching the planet"?

So we built a little log-visualisation tool in Processing which extracts request information from our server logs and animates and geolocates them over time on a spinning globe. Above you see 24 hours of requests from all over the planet, extracted from a log a few weeks old - of course many of them occur so rapidly that they don't appear in this speeded up representation; the brighter the trail the more active that connection is.

IP addresses are geolocated using geoplugin.com and Pachube feeds (usually) contain geolocation information. We'll try this again using one month's of data - but that might take a long time to render. (Processing users may recognise the globe from one of the tutorial files: we've added a time-dependent sun-shadow in order to understand how connections change over time of day).

We think this shows that Pachube is indeed helping patch the planet!