It has been bought to my attention that many of the terms
and references made by myself and others are 'Greek' to many.
This should explain the difference in hits, page views and other
common items you may find in you stats file, if you have that level
of hosting and your hosting company provides it.
The reason for this is simple.
These are important tools for you to use to monitor not only
your site but to help you determine if you should re-do ,add or delete
certain ones.
Thanks,
Robert Nixon
owner/webmaster
http://www.cpucash.net
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site statistics
Introduction
IF Your account comes with HTTP-Analyze preinstalled and configured.
You can view your site statistics by going to the location at
your admin panel.
HTTP-Analyze is a log analyzer for web servers.
It analyzes the logfile of a web server and creates a comprehensive summary
report from the information found there. http-analyze has been optimized to
process large logfiles as fast as possible.
In easier-to-understand terms, HTTP-Analyze is a very powerful traffic analyzer
that quickly and efficiently delivers you statistics on the traffic that your
web pages have generated. It has a user-friendly graphical user interface
(GUI) that by a click of your mouse button will produce your traffic reports.
Below we explain in more detail how this powerful software works with your
web site, as well as provide you with definitions to the results you'll receive.
The web server is a program running on a networked machine, waiting for
connections from the outside world to serve certain documents on behalf of a
request by a browser.
To communicate, the server and the browser use an asynchronous
communication method called the HTTP (hypertext transaction) protocol.
It works as follows:
1. the user starts the browser and types in an URL
2. the browser connects to the given host and requests the specified document.
3. The web server handles the request and sends out a response:
4. if this document exists, the web server delivers it,
5. if it does not exist or if access is not permitted,
the web server sends back an error message instead.
The document delivered as an answer to this request may
contain inline objects. Inline objects are simply URLs
pointing to another resource, either a document, an image,
an applet, a video/audio stream, or any other addressable HTML object.
The browser then requests all inline objects of the current page
from the server using the steps 2 and 3 above,
before it can display the content of that page.
This communication method is called asynchronous,
because the browser sends out many requests for inline documents
at once (without waiting for a response from the server before
sending the next request) using different communication channels:
Since the browser's requests are often handled by different server
processes or different threads of a server process,
there is absolutely no relationship between the logfile entries
caused by the responses from the server due to a request of a
document and it's inline objects.
For example:
the order in which the server logs the successful
transmission of the document itself and the inline images
contained therein is not predictable and depends on the type
of documents, objects, server speed, system and network load,
and many other parameters.
What is logged?
Each and every response from the server - whether it indicates success, an
error, or even a timeout (i.e. no response) - gets logged in the server's
logfile.
Since the server was hit by a request, such a response is called a Hit.
In other words, the total number of hits must equal the total number of
lines in the logfile minus the number of corrupt and empty lines.
A typical logfile entry in the Common Logfile Format looks like:
hostname-[01/Feb/1998:10:10:00 +0100]"GET/index.html HTTP/1.0"200 4839
The hostname field contains the full qualified domain name (FQDN) of the site
accessing your server (see »Special Cases« below). The next two fields usually
contain a minus (`-') to indicate that those fields are empty.
The date is surrounded by square brackets ('[' and ']').
The next field contains the request.
It contains the request method ('GET' for example),
the name of the requested document (URL),
and the protocol specification ('HTTP/1.0').
The following field contains the servers response code
('200' stands for an 'OK', while '404' would mean 'Document not found',
for example). The last field contains the size of the document
(some servers log the number of bytes transferred actually,
while other servers log the size of the document,
which makes a difference if the user interrupts the transfer before
the document could be transmitted completely.
There are two other logfile formats,
the Combined or Extended Logfile Format.
Those formats add the user-agent (browser type)
and the referrer URL (the page, which contains a link
to the requested document if this request for such document
has been generated by following a link) to the logfile entry.
Those Combined or Extended Logfile Format append following two
fields to the Common Logfile Format (CLF) in one of two usual ways:
CLF Mozilla/2.0 (X11; IRIX 6.3; IP22) http://foo/bar.html
CLF "http://foo/bar.html" "Mozilla/2.0
(X11; IRIX 6.3; IP22)"
Note that in the second form, the user-agent and the referrer URL
are surrounded by double quotes, which makes them ambiguous
in certain cases such as erroneous referrer URLs, which contain double quotes.
Therefore, the first form should be preferred if possible.
The entries shown above are the only information the server
records in the logfile. There might be much more information
being transferred from the browser to the server,
but although this additional information is available
through CGI-scripts running on your server,
it gets not logged in the logfile.
Therefore, http-analyze can only show you a summary
of the information in the logfile - nothing more, nothing less.
Special Cases
Caching in the browser:
As soon as a page has been saved in a browser's disk cache,
the browser might send out conditional requests for documents
or inline objects. This conditional request ask the web server
to only send a document/object if it has been modified since the
last time the page has been requested (if the page is still in the browser's
cache).
This way, network traffic is reduced somewhat,
since documents must be transferred only if they have changed recently.
If such a conditional request arrives, the server will respond with a Code
304 (Not Modified) status to indicate that the document hasn't changed or with a
Code 200 (OK) status if it has changed in the meantime.
Since the browser may be configured (and usually is so by default) to only send
out such conditional requests once per session and otherwise unconditionally use
the copy from the cache, you may not even see a Code 304 response if this users
visits your site again in the same session. Conditional requests are then sent
out only if the user terminates the browser session and later restarts the
browser.
Caching in a proxy server:
Organizations with a large number of users
- such as companies, universities, or online providers
- often use a so-called proxy server for mainly two reasons:
Often such organizations have a firewall to protect their internal network
against intruders.
This means, that their network is logically separated from the rest of the
Internet and that they have to use such a proxy server, which is able to
communicate with the inside and the outside of their local network.
To reduce network load somewhat, the proxy server acts as a local copy machine:
As soon as a page is loaded into a browser through such a proxy server, the
proxy saves a copy of this page in it's disk cache much like a browser does in
the scenario above.
This way, documents requested very often by users in the same local network need
to be transferred to the proxy only once, which then answers future
requests for the same page from it's local cache instead of connecting to the
original web server the document originated from.
Both forms of caching make it technically impossible to count visitors or
to track their way through your web site.
All you see in the logfile of your server is only a few initial hits from the
proxy or browser and probably some Code 304 responses
resulting from conditional requests sent out by the proxy or browser,
depending on the preferences settings of the proxy or browser.
Definition of Terms
The statistics report contains among others the following information:
the number of hits, 304's, files, pageviews, sessions, data sent (in KB)
the amount of data requested, transferred, and saved by cache (in KB)
the number of unique URLs, sites, and sessions per month
the number of all response codes other than 200 (OK)
the average hits per weekday and for last week
the maximum/average hits per day and per hour
the number of hits, files, 304's, sites, data sent by day
the top 5 days, 24 hours, 5 minutes and 5 seconds of the summary period
the top 30 most commonly accessed URLs (hits, 304's, data sent)
the 10 least frequently accessed URLs (hits, 304's, data sent)
the top 30 client domains accessing your server most often
the top 30 browser types
the top 30 referrer hosts
the overview/detailed list of all files requested
the overview/detailed list of all sites by domain and reverse domain
the overview/detailed list of all browser types
the overview/detailed list of all referrer URLs
The following table summarizes the meaning of all
terms in the statistics report which are not self-explaining:
Hits
A hit is any response from the server on behalf of a request sent from
a browser.
This includes any response from the server, not only text files or documents.
If, for example, a HTML page has two images embedded, the server
generates three hits if this page is requested: one hit for the HTML page
itself and two hits for the two inline images.
Files
If the user requests a document and the server successfully sends back a
file for this request, this is counted as a Code 200 (OK) response.
Any such response is counted for as a file.
Again, "file" here means any kind of a file.
Code 304
A Code 304 (Not Modified) response is generated by the server if a
document hasn't been updated since the last time it was requested by the user
and therefore there was no need to actually send the files for this document.
This happens if the browser (or a caching proxy server between the browser and
your web server) still has an up-to-date copy of the page in it's local storage
(cache) and therefore can display the page without requesting the actual
content.
This technique is used to reduce network traffic, but it also causes an
inaccuracy in the statistics reports regarding the number of visitors, because
the browser or proxy usually sends only one such a conditional request per user
session if it still holds an up-to-date copy of the file. However, the ratio
between files and 304's reflects the efficiency of overall caching mechanisms
for at least those hits which made it's way to the server.
Page views
Pageviews are all files which either have a text file suffix (.html,
.text) or which are directory index files.
This number allows to estimate the number of "real" documents
transmitted by your server.
If defined correctly, the analyzer rates text files (documents) as
pageviews.
Those pageviews do not include images, CGI scripts, Java applets or any other
HTML objects except all files ending with one of the pre-defined pageview
suffixes, such as .html or .text.
Other responses
There are much more responses than only Code 200 (OK) and Code 304 (Not
Modified) responses, especially in the coming standard, the HTTP 1.1 protocol
specification.
For example:
the server could generate a Code 302 (Redirected) response if a page has moved,
a Code 401 (Unauthorized Request) response if access to the document is denied
or a Code 404 (Not Found) response if the requested page does not exist on this
server.
KBytes transferred
This is the amount of data sent during the whole summary period as
reported by the server.
Note that some servers log the size of a document instead of the actual number
of bytes transferred. While in most cases this is the same, if a user interrupts
the transmission by pressing the browser's stop button before the page has been
received completely, some servers (for example all Netscape web servers) do not
log the amount of data transferred but the amount of data which would have been
transferred if the user would have completely loaded the page.
KBytes requested
This is the amount of data requested during the whole summary period.
http-analyze computes this number by summing up the values of KBytes transferred
and KBytes saved by cache (see below).
KBytes saved by cache
The amount of data saved by various caching mechanisms such as in proxy
servers or in browsers.
This value is computed by multiplying the number of Code 304 (Not
Modified) requests per file with the size of the corresponding file. Note:
Because http-analyze can determine
the size of a file only if the file has been requested at least once in the same
summary period, the values for KBytes saved by cache and KBytes requested are
just approximations of the real values.
Unique URLs
Unique URLs are the number of all different,
valid URLs requested in a given summary period. This shows you the number of all
different files requested at least once in the corresponding summary period.
Unique sites
This is the sum of all unique hosts accessing the server during a given
time-window .
The time-window is hardwired to the length of the current month. This means that
if a host accesses your server very often, it gets counted only once during the
whole month.
Only the sum of the unique hosts per month is listed in the statistics report.
Sessions
Similar to unique sites, this is the number of unique hosts accessing the
server during a given time-window. This time-window is one day by default for
backward compatibility,but it can be changed with the option -u or the Session
directive in the configuration file.
For example:
if the time-window is two hours, all accesses from a certain host in
less than 2 hours after the first access from this host are lumped together into
one session.
All following accesses more than 2 hours apart from the first access will be
counted as a new session. This way you may get an estimated number of how many
sessions are started on different sites to access your server.
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