Hello list,
it's been almost two years since we started collecting sanitized Apache web server logs. During this time the number of Tor Browser initial downloads rarely went below 70,000 per day.
https://metrics.torproject.org/webstats-tb.html
Either there must be a steady demand for fresh binaries, or there is a non-zero number of bots downloading the Tor Browser binary several times per day.
I already double-checked our aggregation code that takes sanitized web server logs as input and produces daily totals as output. It looks okay to me.
I'd also like to double-check whether there's anything unexpected happening before the sanitizing step. For example, could it be that there are a few IP addresses making hundreds or thousands of requests?
Or are there lots of requests with same referrers or common user agents indicating bots?
My plan is to ask our admins to temporarily add a second Apache log file on one of the dist.torproject.org hosts with the default Apache log file format without the sanitizing that is usually applied.
A snapshot of 15 or 30 minutes would likely be sufficient as sample. I'd analyze this log file on the server, delete it, and report my findings here.
This message has two purposes:
1. Is this approach acceptable? If not, are there more acceptable approaches yielding similar results?
2. Are there any theories what might keep the numbers from dropping below those 70,000 requests per day? What should I be looking for?
Thanks!
All the best, Karsten