We analyzed the average page count and yearly production for RFCs. Note that there are 207 RFCs, published mostly through 1984, that are not online or do not have page numbers in an easily parsable format.
From the IMR, we also tabulated the number of Internet Drafts published, including revisions.
Analysis: The page count has fluctuated somewhat, settling on a range of 20 to 30 after 1979. A few very large RFCs can distort this metric considerably; a median would be more useful, but this is left as an exercise to the reader.
The overall RFC editor bandwidth increased dramatically after about 1985, but has fluctuated significantly between 4,000 and 8,000 pages per year in more recent years.
The data was extracted from the Internet Monthly Reports (IMR) and the IETF announcement mail archive. (For some reason, the IETF web site only has IETF announcements from August 1998 onwards. IMRs are available starting 1988.) The data was parsed and imported into EDAS and netbib, written by the author.
The publication activity was tabulated via
select year(published),sum(pages),count(pages),round(sum(pages)/count(pages),1) from paper where trtype='rfc' group by year(published);
The latency was tabulated via
select year(published),count(*),avg(to_days(published)-to_days(modified))/30 from paper,paperlog where paper.paper=paperlog.paper and trtype='RFC' and value like "%-00" group by year(published);
The raw data is available as a comma-separated file as rfc-data.txt, generated as
select number,published,modified,value from paper,paperlog where paper.paper=paperlog.paper and trtype='RFC' and value like "%-00" order by number,value into outfile '/tmp/rfc.dat' fields terminated by ',';
The columns are: RFC number, date RFC published, date of -00 draft, name of -00 draft.
Below is the distribution across all RFCs measured, tabulated in 3-month units.
Year | I-Ds published | RFCs published (total) | RFCs published (with pages) | Total RFC page count | Average RFC page count | RFCs measured | Delay -00 to publication, months |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1968 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 7.0 | |||
1969 | 20 | 12 | 50 | 4.2 | |||
1970 | 57 | 49 | 320 | 6.5 | |||
1971 | 169 | 153 | 793 | 5.2 | |||
1972 | 113 | 105 | 442 | 4.2 | |||
1973 | 158 | 114 | 625 | 5.5 | |||
1974 | 58 | 25 | 151 | 6.0 | |||
1975 | 24 | 11 | 48 | 4.4 | |||
1976 | 11 | 9 | 85 | 9.4 | |||
1977 | 19 | 9 | 90 | 10.0 | |||
1978 | 8 | 3 | 23 | 7.7 | |||
1979 | 6 | 3 | 80 | 26.7 | |||
1980 | 15 | 8 | 267 | 33.4 | |||
1981 | 27 | 13 | 482 | 37.1 | |||
1982 | 34 | 13 | 165 | 12.7 | |||
1983 | 44 | 38 | 468 | 12.3 | |||
1984 | 38 | 34 | 865 | 25.4 | |||
1985 | 39 | 39 | 645 | 16.5 | |||
1986 | 23 | 23 | 551 | 24.0 | |||
1987 | 41 | 41 | 1422 | 34.7 | |||
1988 | 45 | 45 | 1063 | 23.6 | |||
1990 | 55 | 55 | 1904 | 34.6 | |||
1991 | 148 | 91 | 91 | 2174 | 23.9 | 7 | 5.2 |
1992 | 363 | 94 | 94 | 2176 | 23.1 | 29 | 7.2 |
1993 | 567 | 170 | 170 | 3748 | 22.0 | 63 | 9.5 |
1994 | 655 | 176 | 176 | 4452 | 25.3 | 91 | 10.0 |
1995 | 988 | 126 | 126 | 2652 | 21.0 | 81 | 10.8 |
1996 | 1380 | 170 | 170 | 3337 | 19.6 | 129 | 13.2 |
1997 | 2200 | 187 | 187 | 4798 | 25.7 | 114 | 16.5 |
1998 | 2316 | 227 | 227 | 5924 | 26.1 | 189 | 21.5 |
1999 | 2523 | 255 | 255 | 7671 | 30.1 | 248 | 21.4 |
2000 | 3194 | 278 | 278 | 7670 | 27.6 | 276 | 24.0 |
2001 | 3638 | 190 | 190 | 4648 | 24.5 | 206 | 18.6 |
2002 | 3328 | 218 | 218 | 5754 | 26.4 | 222 | 23.2 |
2003 |
These statistics have a number of possible problems. They are based on matching names and draft titles from the Internet Monthly Report (IMR) with the RFC titles. Sometimes titles and I-D identifiers change as the I-D progresses from -00 to RFC, so that a precise match would require a manual analysis. (Unfortunately, there seems to be no public database for all RFC announcements; only those from August 1998 onwards seem to be available. There does not appear to be another database that records the original I-D.) Most of the early RFCs were not published as Internet Drafts, thus, we omit years before 1991.
In some cases, e.g., in 2001 and 2002, there are more entries than published RFCs. This is caused by RFCs that have multiple I-D sources. Unfortunately, there is no automated way to eliminate this error. It also tends to lower the estimate. However, just restricting this to draft-ietf-* I-Ds changes the 2002 delay to 23.6, i.e., makes hardly any difference.
Since many drafts change title or identifiers (from draft-person to draft-ietf), the delays are likely to be conservative.
Since the IMRs do not record the precise publication date, we assume that each I-D is published in the middle of the month. Months are measured at 30 days.
We only include RFCs where we have a date for -00 draft. For reasons that are unclear, some drafts do not appear in the IMRs.
Some remarks:
Last updated by Henning Schulzrinne