download issues

[matthewdean]

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 downlaoad the file have gone astray and actually there have only been 95 downloads.

Can anyone out there help with this?

Regards,
Matt

[bhartzer]

Yes, your assumption that there was only 95 downloads would be correct.

The question I have for you is "Why is this information important for a Intranet site?"

[matthewdean]

I got 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 the total volume may not represent the total downloads, because in the case of downloads from a proxy the file still gets delivered even though it comes from a different site.

As to your other question why this is important for an intranet site, I can only say that there's plenty of interest in the performance of intranet websites.