Cloudflare’s analytics products help customers answer questions about their traffic by analyzing the mind-boggling, ever-increasing number of events (HTTP requests, Workers requests, Spectrum events) logged by Cloudflare products every day. The answers to these questions depend on the point of view of the question being asked, and we’ve come up with a way to exploit this fact to improve the quality and responsiveness of our analytics.

Useful Accuracy

Consider the following questions and answers:

What is the length of the coastline of Great Britain? 12.4K km

**What is the total world population? **7.8B

**How many stars are in the Milky Way? **250B

**What is the total volume of the Antarctic ice shelf? **25.4M km3

What is the worldwide production of lentils? 6.3M tonnes

**How many HTTP requests hit my site in the last week? **22.6M

**Useful answers do not benefit from being overly exact. For large quantities, knowing the correct order of magnitude and a few significant digits gives the most useful answer. At Cloudflare, the difference in traffic between different sites or when a single site is under attack can cross nine **orders of magnitude and, in general, all our traffic follows a Pareto distribution, meaning that what’s appropriate for one site or one moment in time might not work for another.

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