download issues

Hi,

I'm webmastering two intranet sites. I want to know about the situation of hit count vs transfer volume. Is the only way to get a reliable count of the number of actual downloads by calculating with the file size against the raw bytes transferred as a result of download attempts for the corresponding file?

The raw hits count should agree with the transfer volume based on the corresponding file size. In this case it's just a matter of simple arithmetic.

If I have a file of size 76kb and a hit count of 115, there should be a transfer volume of 87Mb. But if the transfer volume is only 72Mb, that means that some 20 attempts to download the file have gone astray and actually there have only been 95 downloads.

Can anyone out there help with this?

Regards,
Matt

the file can be partially downloded.

you can wirte a simple script to record who/when request the file, or check the raw access logs.

You could also make a script that just keeps count of how many times it has been downloaded using PHP.

Thanks for your suggestions, I'll keep them in mind. I actually did get this from another source:

"If there's a caching proxy between you and the recipient, the proxy will probe with a HEAD request (which will be a hit) but send the data back from its own copy."

This means that files can be delivered without impacting the transfer volume, and putting simple, one-to-one calculations out of whack.

Cheers,
Matt