For over six years I've been posting bookmarks to my Delicious site. Right now there are 4576 links in my account. I've occasionally felt uneasy about bookmarks becoming unavailable because of a site closing down, or a site operator who doesn't know that cool URIs don't change. This process is called link rot.

In order to find out whether I'm having a problem with link rot, I wrote a script that goes through my bookmarks and checks for dead links. The results look like this:

Since I posted at a somewhat constant pace for those six years, the following chart is meaningful:

It turns out that as far as my bookmarks are concerned, link rot is much less of a problem than I thought. When I look at posts from the last two years, only 1.38% of them are dead links. The number grows to 5% after 4 years, but I stop caring about links long before that.