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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Neat. I just accidentally caught it. I was taking a look at some of my stats and saw:

2,000,019 Downloads

That's a lot. :D
Choul
Posts: 487

Post by Choul »

Nicholas wrote:Neat. I just accidentally caught it. I was taking a look at some of my stats and saw:

2,000,019 Downloads

That's a lot. :D
Wow, that's really a lot!
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It's still mostly an estimate... especially from the first year or so. But they were all "live" numbers. A while back I incorporated the download count from the 3 or 4 other sites out there that decided to mirror the older versions of the game (without asking me :( ). Also, that certainly isn't unique users. Every time someone clicks one of the development preview links, that adds one too. So, you forum types that participate in the dev previews have probably counted for 30 or 40 yourselves.

Still, it's a pretty big number. These days it's about 3,000 downloads a day.
TonE
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by TonE »

I wish you lots of millions, not only downloads! ;) With Synthesia you have created something which lets any musician smile, no matter if a beginner or long time pianist, keyboard player or music lover. Well I am sure all long time pianists do not use Synthesia at all, they are all flying in other dimensions.
vicentefer31
Posts: 899

Post by vicentefer31 »

TonE wrote:I wish you lots of millions, not only downloads! ;)
Best wishes too
Picasso: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It's probably worth mentioning that a good half million of those downloads were during the first couple years before the Learning Pack existed.

I'm also hoping for those (other) millions, but we're not quite there yet. ;)

Thanks for the encouragement though. You guys continue to make this an awesome project to work on. :D
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Hmm, now that the version check stuff is in a live version, I have a new source of stats. This is a little bit disconcerting:

Downloads over the last few days:
  • Aug-2: 4427
  • Aug-3: 5384
  • Aug-4: 3531 (with 7 hour outage)
Number of version checks:
  • Aug-2: 1545
  • Aug-3: 1672
  • Aug-4: 1117
I wonder what's happening to the other 3/4 of the downloads that look like they're never even executed. :?

I guess the check only runs every 3 days. Maybe people that already have it are just compulsively downloading it every day...
vicentefer31
Posts: 899

Post by vicentefer31 »

Nicholas wrote: I wonder what's happening to the other 3/4 of the downloads that look like they're never even executed. :?
Firewalls?

Edit:
I have another idea but I'm not going to say it because I want to respect the new Forum rules:
No explicit, hateful, or hurtful language. Nothing illegal or Posts that have [redacted!] in them. :lol:
Picasso: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I dunno, it shouldn't even prompt you, right? I guess I run with UAC turned off... but my understanding is that it's just plain old outgoing port-80 traffic. If you can look at web pages, you should be able to use this without any special firewall settings.
aria1121
Posts: 1505

Post by aria1121 »

vicentefer31 wrote: Edit:
I have another idea but I'm not going to say it because I want to respect the new Forum rules
Aaahhh... I think I know it...
vicentefer31
Posts: 899

Post by vicentefer31 »

blackboard.png
blackboard.png (124.69 KiB) Viewed 13814 times
Picasso: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Hmm, looking at my IIS logs for the download script, it looks like people just click a bunch of times. Like... way more frequently than I would have suspected. And not just like a double (or triple) click all in the same second. At time 0, 5 seconds, 6, 7, 10, and 17 seconds after the first click. This looks like it's happening more often than it's not (say, 80% of the time).

I can't imagine it's because the file isn't coming down. The response I get is virtually immediate. I wonder if they don't notice it's gone in their little download list or whatever. Now I know why Microsoft and a few other big companies have switched to the pages with the 5-second count-down before the download begins. So people don't rapidly click.
Zageron
Posts: 84

Post by Zageron »

Is there a version check every time you open the game, or is it the FIRST time you open the game?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Version check is once every three days. The download counter ticks every time you click one of the 3 links on the download page though.

In the meantime, I have an experimental solution on the download page. Now when you click a download link it becomes... not a link. So you can only click it once. I'll see how much email that generates, but hopefully it will make my download counts look a little more realistic.

In the meantime, I suppose I can't claim 2M downloads anymore. :( I guess can't really trust that number at all now.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It might have been a false alarm. Quite a few of the multi-click looking things in the IIS logs were something like one good request followed by several lines of time-out type stuff from misbehaving proxies or browsers. Searching around for the various codes I was seeing came up with descriptions like "once the browser is finished getting the file it just closes the connection instead of sending the last ACK." Those extra lines are IIS expressing that it's lonely and wishes it had friends that said goodbye properly.

I could correlate my download hit entries to the IIS logs but that sounds like a ton of effort. I'm not quite that obsessive about this yet. ;)
aria1121
Posts: 1505

Post by aria1121 »

Hmmm... you mean there are much (much much) more downloads because the last ' download hits ' doesnt get received on your server?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Nah, the latest I can gather now is that the download counter is more-or-less accurate with the exception of people that double-clicked the download link. And with my experimental solution in place, we'll see how large an impact that had. In a few days I'll be able to compare the stats from before and after that fix.
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