This is [probably] a really stupid question, but what are requests, exactly? I'm guessing this is similar to a "hit" on a webpage. Am I close? :-\

Well this is a guess but I think it is correct.

Anytime the server has to send information to a computer. So anytime you click on a page to load it or download a file. And there is probably more that I don't know of. I'll let someone else inform us on that.

From checking my own (admittedly much, much smaller) apache log (of which most hits seem to be people with nimda like worms) it seems to be every item on every page (the HTML file, and all images on it, and the favicon sometimes (IE doesn't usually show these...))

wait, what do you mean "requests"? Do you mean there have been half a billion of questions asking for something in particular? god, what a bunch of whinners ¬_¬

A "request" in Internet terms is any time your browser goes to the web site and says, "I'd like to order your http://www.ticalc.org/ special!"
The server responds to your request with the web page.

Who wants to bet how many of those requests were from ticalc.org staff members?

;)

Not half a billion ;)

Maybe I should step in and note that maybe not all of the requests were actual pageloads?

A "request" is anytime the browser requests the information from the server. The server responds with the HTML content of the page requested. If that page contains <img> tags, the browser builds a list of images to request (an <img> tag is not counted if it is the exact same URL as another one already seen), then does an HTTP GET for those images as well. So a web page with 30 _different_ pictures will generate 31 requests, even though there was only one pageload.

Thus, in an image-heavy site, # requests become less meaningful than # pageloads. A pageload could be seen as a request for any file with a MIME Type of text/* (be it text/plain, text/html, or whatever). Depending on site content you could add some application/* categories as well (such as application/ms-word if you are .DOC file heavy).

Yay! Maybe the 1 billion mark will be hit in less time than the .5 billion mark. ;)

Can "you" tell me what is a REQUEST. does it represent a downlaod?

oh boy. Haven't you read the thread above? a request is when a server retrieves information from a given website, in this case, http://www.ticalc.org. So that means that .5 billion pages, pictures, downloads, etc. have been requested from www.ticalc.org