[metrics-team] What's up with Tor Metrics showing a 50% drop in 'directly connecting users'?

[Karsten Loesing]

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On 18/11/15 11:40, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> On 17/11/15 19:43, cringey at sigaint.org wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
> 
>> Tor Metrics is reporting that the number of 'directly connecting 
>> users' nearly halved in a single day (November 13th) and hasn't 
>> climbed back up.
> 
>> Reference:
> 
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2015-11-12&end=2015-11-15&country=all&events=points
>
>>  The chart has been riding the 2 million mark for a very long
>> time until this happened.
> 
>> So what's up with that?  Technical hitch? Censorship event?
> 
> I aborted the cronjob that updates user number estimates in the 
> background, which somehow produced incorrect results.  I'm
> currently waiting for the next run to fix that, which should be
> done around 21:00 UTC today.  If that doesn't fix the problem, I'll
> dig deeper.

It took a few days longer than expected, but it's fixed now.
Estimating user numbers is really one of the most data-intensive
computations on the Metrics website.

> But we can certainly rule out a censorship event as possible
> cause.
> 
> Thanks for pointing this out.

If you see a similar problem in the future, please let us know, either
here or using the bug tracker with component Metrics.  Thanks.

All the best,
Karsten
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