D1.2: An Information structure to provide categories and subcategories relevant for FIDIS

FIDIS Communication Infrastructure STATISTICS OF THE SYSTEM

Statistics of the System

For the development process and the maintenance of the website and the internal portal, some performance parameters are monitored. This is done, to provide information for optimisations of the system. Figure 15 and Table 2 show some of the results: 

Figure 15: Usage Statistics of the FIDIS.net Website.

The increasing numbers of ”Hits” indicates an active usage of the website by its users, while the stable development of the “Files” and “Pages” value show the success of the continues optimisations of the systems. For a better understanding of the terms used here, the following definitions were created: 

1. “Hits” represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc.).

2. “Files” represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as “404-Not Found” requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

3. Sites” is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many IP addresses so it should be used simply as a rough gauge as to the number of visitors to your server.

4. “Visits” occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same “Visit”. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new “Visit” is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non-page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

5. “Pages” are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi. 

Table 2: Detailed figures of the current system usage.