Hello Jonathan,
[quote]I’ve discovered that the apache access logs on my server will report
the full filesize of a file that is only partially transferred to a
user (due to user disconnect or cancellation, for example). This
causes analog to report inflated statistics regarding bandwidth use.
[/quote]
My apologies for the delay in getting to your ticket. We have been a bit
swamped and are working hard to catch up.
I have also had experience with apache and how weird it logs large files
that are only partially downloaded. I’m afraid it isn’t just a config on
your server, because all servers are configured exactly the same with us.
Apache does at least put in a special status code for such content, 206
- Partial Content. It is up to the stats program to work with the status
code and filter out the junk. Analog I’m afraid doesn’t do this, neither
does webalizer. The only program I’ve seen do this yet would be awstats.
For example, on a site that I host, that has lots of linux source
packages and livecd isos:
Webalizer shows 2TB of traffic this month, which is just insane and not
true. It doesn’t filter out the 206 status code logs:
http://stats.cross-lfs.org/webalizer/ftp.lfs-matrix.net/usage_200609.html
Awstats on the other hand is smart enough to know this, and will sort the
206 logs into a different category:
http://stats.cross-lfs.org/awstats.httpftp.html
There is shows that there is really only 90GB of downloads, while the 206
status codes make up over 1800MB of junk.
That is on a normal configured apache2 system as well. So there really
isn’t anything we can do for this I’m afraid, I’ve searched on my own
before for a way to fix this but haven’t had any luck. If you need to
have dead-one perfect total download calculations, you might need to
switch to a different stats program.
As for the actual traffic used, according to the admins this is
calculated over the network and so this shouldn’t have any negative
effect on your traffic numbers with us at DreamHost. As for others not
having this problem, they either don’t have that many large files, they
aren’t often downloaded or they are more often downloaded to completion.
Let me know if you have further problems or questions.
Thanks!
Justin