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# Message Archiving Benchmark: How Many Letters Are in Messages?
- URL: https://www.process-one.net/blog/message-archiving-benchmark-how-many-letters-are-in-messages/
- Published: 2007-07-07T22:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-09-24T14:28:20.000Z
- Author: ProcessOne

Let’s look at distribution of the number of letters in message’s body. Note, that it’s not a byte length, it’s an amount of Unicode symbols. Cyrillic characters are represented using 2 bytes in UTF-8, so some messages can be actually 2 times longer in bytes. Also AFAIK English sentences are generally shorter than Russian, so average message length should be less for servers with English-speaking users.

![](https://www.process-one.net/content/images/2024/09/3-8.jpg)

Here is the plot of length distribution histogram.  

![image](https://www.process-one.net/images/uploads/msglen.png)
  
  
It is well-known that the number of letters per word and the number of words per sentence are [log-normally distributed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal%5Fdistribution?ref=process-one.net), so no wonder this distribution is also log-normal. Green line here plots probability density function (PDF) of Log-N(2.83, 1.15), and you can see it fits actual data pretty good.