Message Board

Bugs & Development

Counts and Stats

Author: C.Pettinger (20 Dec 04 12:22pm)

My "Addresses Issued on Your Site" numbers do not appear to be counting up. Recently I had a harvester go through (clearly evident in logs) yet my numbers have not increased for several days.

Are addresses actually still being handed out? And, more importantly, are they being logged, even if my stats are not being updated?

I know there was some discussion of "doing more" with the individual and project-wide statistics, could frozen statistics be a transient thing having to do with this? I guess I really don't care if they are not accurate at this point, I just want to make sure the important things are still working.

Re: Counts and Stats

Author: M.Prince (21 Dec 04 4:35pm)

The counts and stats are cached periodically and not updated in realtime. For the global stats, the updates are released approximately daily. The stats on individual honey pots update on a variable frequency depending on the traffic your honey pot gets. All stats should be considered approximate for a number of reasons.

The way the system is architected, the data supplied to each honey pot is independent of the master database. Without getting into too much detail, the master database fills your honey pot with a set of addresses and your honey pot isn't refilled until its supply is close to empty. There are a number of reasons for this including our ability to distribute the load from honey pot requests across multiple machines and also to limit the damage from any abuse.

The number of addresses issued to your honey pot is variable depending on its historical traffic. We try and issue the right number so that each honey pot checks in about once a day.

One consequence of this design is that the stats are not updated in realtime and therefore may not show addresses being issued to an individual harvester that passes through your site. You're also likely to see the stats increase in jumps, rather than as each new address is issued.

Check back in a bit and your "frozen" stats will have increased. And rest assured that your honey pot is still working, addresses are still being issued, and we're still tracking anyone who steals them. (In fact, the last hourly update that just went through a few minutes ago just identified 4 new harvesters! The stats will reflect the new captures later this afternoon.)

Re: Counts and Stats

Author: C.Pettinger (22 Dec 04 1:11am)

Very cool. I guess I never knew that they were batched. I assumed it was a one-for-one thing where my box talked to yours every time the page loaded. Of course the batch transfer makes infinitely more sense.
As usual, you guys have your stuff together. Very nice.