More statistics

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Feb 7, 2008 8:32 AM, Dimitris Glezos <dimitris at glezos.com> wrote:
> Sounds like something we'd like to have as well for Fedora?


Mozilla is really lucky... the firefox application attempts to phone
home on each start up looking for addon updates as part of its normal
operation.  That consistency in phoning home makes for some very
useful stats.

We aren't that lucky.
We've absolutely no way to track livecd usage as far as I know.

I also personally think people are still turning off yum-updatesd out
of ingrained habit.
yum-updatesd is the closest thing to what mozilla has in terms of a
heartbeat.  Unfortunately yum-updatesd continues to get in the way of
people using their system and they turn it off, ruining the
consistency of our stats.  It's also complicated by the fact that when
people use a local mirror, we lose sight of them completely.  People
aren't setting up local mirrors for firefox plugins, 99.9% of firefox
users hit the mozilla servers for updates on each client start up.

What I want...what I really really want.... is a very simple heartbeat
that is on for all fedora clients by default.. that does NOT get in
the way of normal operation of anything.

This would suffice for what I need in terms of metrics:
retrieval of a specific URL at our mirrorlist server which encodes the
spin used on the client at some regular occuring time period but which
is not tied to a specific clock time.
For example have each Fedora client, by default, request the URL every
6 hours, and start this repeating process as part of boot up, so that
the time offsets from client to client will be random.  The clock
offset randomness is important statistically. I do NOT want this
heartbeat linked to an absolute time.  I do NOT want all clients in
the same timezone requesting the URL at 6:05 PM for example.

I want a client heartbeat on by default, even for live spins.  If
people want to turn it off, we should of course allow that, but it
should be opt out.

-jef