Subject: Request for download stats on release

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 11:04:57 -0700

Folks,

Is there a way we can get word to all the mirrors, asking them to compile 
download counts for the week after 8.0 final release?  I'd really like to 
have some stats to give reporters, and we had trouble collecting these last 
time, so I'm asking way in advance this time.

-- 
-Josh Berkus
 "A developer of Very Little Brain"
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco

---

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 17:15:56 +0100

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Josh Berkus [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: 11 August 2004 17:07
> To: Dave Page; PostgreSQL www
> Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] Request for download stats on release
> 
> Dave,
> 
> > Last time round we did tell them that this wasn't going to become a 
> > regular request.
> 
> Yes, but last time round we also didn't get the figures; many 
> mirrors never responded, and others did for the week *after* 
> release week.
> 
> > We can certainly email them, however bear in mind that it 
> tends to be 
> > the smaller mirrors that help, so the stats are not going 
> to be that 
> > accurate.
> 
> Oh.  Then there isn't any way to get a reasonably accurate 
> download count?

Not that I know of. The larger sites (the likes of sunsite,
mirror.ac.uk, heanet.ie etc.) are unlikely to start grepping their ftp
logs for us. The smaller ones, run by community members are far more
likely to, but then how representative are their stats?

I think the only way you'll get anything more than 'it's at least x' is
by hiding the downloads behind a php script that logs each download, no
matter which mirror it's from - and even then you'll still miss those
users that use ftp the 'proper way'.

Regards, Dave.

---

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 22:58:48 +0100

> Sent: 12 August 2004 22:06
> To: Dave Page
> Cc: PostgreSQL www
> > Yeah, but I think what Peter was suggesting was that if you got the 
> > same figure from the same mirrors for 8.0, then at least 
> you could say 
> > 'well, it looks like a 175% increase over last time from these 10 
> > mirrors, let's assume the rest are the same'
>  
> Yeah, that would be good.  Do you think the mirrors would go for it?

We can only ask. I'll see if I can find the script I got them to run
last time round tomorrow.

Regards, Dave.

---

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 10:26:16 +0100

> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Dave Page
> Sent: 12 August 2004 22:59
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: PostgreSQL www
> We can only ask. I'll see if I can find the script I got them 
> to run last time round tomorrow.
> 

OK, found it. This is the email I sent to all the ftp mirrors last time.
Do you want to handle this the same way again? Any changes to the
message (other than the obvious!)?

Regards, Dave

Hello,

You have received this email because your email address is registered as
the contact address for one of the ftp.postgresql.org mirror sites. If
this is incorrect, please contact me and I will amend our records.

As you may be aware, on the 17th of November the PostgreSQL Global
Development Group announced the release of PostgreSQL 7.4. In order to
try to guage the usage and take-up of the new release, we would
appreciate it if you could find a few minutes to provide us with some
statistics. The data we are looking for is simply the number of
downloads for each of four files:

/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-7.4.tar.gz
/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-7.4.tar.bz2
/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-base-7.4.tar.gz
/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-base-7.4.tar.bz2

This information may be obtained from standard ftp server transfer logs
on a Unix system using a command similar to the following:

grep /var/spool/ftp/pub/source/v7.4/ /var/log/xferlog | \ awk '{print
$9}' | \ egrep
"postgresql-7.4.tar.bz2|postgresql-7.4.tar.gz|postgresql-base-7.4.tar.bz
2|postgresql-base-7.4.tar.gz" | \ egrep -v "md5" | \ sort | \ uniq -c |
\ sort -nr

Note that the directory and logfilename may need to be adjusted for your
particular system. This command should produce output similar to:

 210 /var/spool/ftp/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-7.4.tar.gz
 111 /var/spool/ftp/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-7.4.tar.bz2
  20 /var/spool/ftp/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-base-7.4.tar.bz2
  19 /var/spool/ftp/pub/source/v7.4/postgresql-base-7.4.tar.gz

Please email the output from your system to me, and thank you for
helping support PostgreSQL!

Regards, Dave.

--
Dave Page
PostgreSQL Web Team