Aykut Demirkol wrote:
Ahmet wrote:
Hi,
I am trying to count web hits of users. With using proxy it is seems
to be easy (I tried combinations of squid, tiny, privoxy in
transparent modes).
But it is obvious that the hits in the logs not purely the hits that
users wanted to do.
For example when a user goes to cnn.com, cnn.com calls other ad pages
or non-ad pages and it is seen as an user hit in logs. So for real
hit count an analysis must be made on logs.
Do you know any tool, proxy that can help in such analysis?
Second choice is writing own tool that can be parsing the logs and
doing an analysis on referer field. But solely depending on referer
can cause false positive results for users clicking on a link on a page.
To further investigate the issue I listened (by ethereal) outgoing
packets for a usual user behavior (clicking on a link) and page
calling pages. In request packets they all seem to have same headers
and similar header values. So I stucked and could not found any
possible piece of evidence to track and distinguish the hits.
Is there a known theoretical or practical way for distinguishing this
behaviours?
No.
We use http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ because we need some kind of
count, but there's no way to count "people seeing the page".
You've got robots of various kinds and user agents that lie and all
kinds of other stuff that makes the data "fuzzy". The best you can
get is a general increasing or decreasing trend.
For all you know, someone's using a script to launch a browser to hit
your page as a diagnostic poll to see if their connection is still up.
Having said all that, awstats will probably do what you want it to.
Cheers!
Daniel thanks for reply.
I need to learn exact action taken on the client browser such as if user
clicked the link or incoming page is calling another page.
So parsing and analyzing proxy logs or apache logs seems to not helping
in that case.
Such information usually given in HTTP Referer: header.
Any finder grain than available in those headers and logs requires
complete control of every machine on The Internet connecting to your page.
Amos
--
Please use Squid 2.6STABLE17+ or 3.0STABLE1+
There are serious security advisories out on all earlier releases.
