Access counter and statistics by DeleGate

Yutaka Sato
May 11, 2006

Basic functionality for access counters and real-time statistics were built-into DeleGate/9.2.0. It is applied not only to access count from clients but also to general counts including Referers, errors, and more, in future. So far, the following counters have been implemented.

This built-in counter is intended to be used to show real-time statistics of DeleGate servers too. It will be convenient to be able to get statistics in real-time and without keeping a large volume of log files.


Basic Usage

Counters are enabled with the COUNTER parameter, as follows in the simplest.

A SSI tag "COUNTER" is introduced to show values in counters. The simplest example is the access counter of the SHTML page including the tag.

There are three types of counters based on (client's) IP address; the first one is incremented on every hit, the second one is incremented excluding repetitive hit by the same IP address, and the third one is incremented excluding repetitive hit by one of last ten IP addresses. Each counter is represented with %T, %U, and %V respectively in a format string given by the fmt="formatString" attribute. Yet another count is "network count" which is represented as "%N" in the format string. It is introduced to be a metrics of the coverage or distribution of (client's) IP addresses on the address space. It is not a counter incremented on each hit, but the number of bits in a bit map of network addresses. In the current implementation, the width of the network mask is 10 bits, therefore the logical maximum number of "%N" is 1024. The map of networks can be shown with "%M" as follows. In the map, each true bit is marked with 'X' while false bit is marked with '-'. The recent ten networks are marked with a digit from '0' to '9'. The recent ten IP addresses can be shown with "%L" as follows. This table of recent 10 addresses is managed in the LRU order, that is the entry of the least recentry hit is pushed out from the table.

[ The source of this SHTML file ( hits) ]