How is traffic calculated now?

A year ago a maxxed out mainland sim (40 people) would generate about 60K in traffic. Now that same number only generates about 25K.

Also a year ago I never saw traffic rise much above 60K, now traffic at the popular places is over 120K.

How is traffic calculated, and is it unfairly skewed toward Island owners vs. Mainland tenants?

Traffic = 1 point per avatar minute spent on the parcel by anyone other than the parcel owner (or spent by anyone if the parcel is group-owned).

Is it skewed toward islands? In a sense, only because an island can pump its maximum allowed simultaneous visitors to 100 whereas a non-Linden mainland sim can only accommodate 40.

Fun fact: Every once in a while you'll see an island with over 100 people in it. This is because SL lets you log into a full sim if it was the place where you were when you logged out. Their traffic gets counted too.

But generally, you'll never see an island sim with traffic higher than 144000 or a mainland sim with traffic higher than 57600.

Same difference, though because any place with traffic over 40K SUCKS performance-wise.

okay so if the land is deeded to Group, and all the visitors are members of the group, they do not count as traffic? Or is it just the Owner(s) in a group that are not counted?

And I still believe that traffic is being calcuated differently. It seems to be about half what it was a year ago for mainland sims.

No, they all count as traffic. Only the avatar that owns a parcel individually doesn't count. That's nobody if it's group land.

/me is not sure that's true any more. I think they account for how much time the avatar spends in SL when they dish out the points/minute.

Like, if you have Avatar1 that's in SL for an hour a day and Avatar2 that's in SL for 4 hours a day, having Avatar1 spend 30 minutes at your place gets you more traffic than having Avatar2 spend 30 minutes at your place.

Actually, that's the thing that's not true anymore. You can test the minute-per-avatar thing very easily, and the stats of the top sims (mainland and island) bear this out as well. Several people on these forums have done controlled tests to confirm this too. Leave an av on a locked parcel for 2 days (so you're sure to get into the secret traffic window) and you get 1440 traffic. That's how many minutes in a day.