| Term |
Color |
Meaning |
| Hits |
 |
A hit is any response from the server on
behalf of a request sent from a browser. This includes any
response from the server, not only text files or documents. If,
for example, a HTML page has two images embedded, the server
generates three hits if this page is requested: one hit for the
HTML page itself and two hits for the two inline images. |
| Files |
 |
If the user requests a document and the server
successfully sends back a file for this request, this is counted
as a Code 200 (OK) response. Any such response is counted
for as a file. Again, "file" here means any kind of a
file. |
| Code 304 |
 |
A Code 304 (Not Modified) response is
generated by the server if a document hasn't been updated since
the last time it was requested by the user and therefore there was
no need to actually send the files for this document. This happens
if the browser (or a caching proxy server between the browser and
your web server) still has an up-to-date copy of the page in it's
local storage (cache) and therefore can display the page without
requesting the actual content. This technique is used to reduce
network traffic, but it also causes an inaccuracy in the
statistics reports regarding the number of visitors, because the
browser or proxy usually sends only one such a conditional request
per user session if it still holds an up-to-date copy of the file.
However, the ratio between files and 304's reflects
the efficiency of overall caching mechanisms for at least those
hits which made it's way to the server. |
| Pageviews |
 |
Pageviews are all files which either have a text
file suffix (.html, .text) or which are directory
index files. This number allows to estimate the number of
"real" documents transmitted by your server. If defined
correctly, the analyzer rates text files (documents) as pageviews.
Those pageviews do not include images, CGI scripts, Java applets
or any other HTML objects except all files ending with one of the
pre-defined pageview suffixes, such as .html or .text.
See also the PageView directive in the section Configuration
File in the manpage. |
| Other responses |
 ¹ |
There are much more responses than only Code
200 (OK) and Code 304 (Not Modified) responses,
especially in the coming standard, the HTTP 1.1 protocol
specification. For example, the server could generate a Code
302 (Redirected) response if a page has moved, a Code 401
(Unauthorized Request) response if access to the document is
denied or a Code 404 (Not Found) response if the requested
page does not exist on this server. See the HTML
specification for information about all valid responses from a
web server. Note that http-analyze does recognize HTTP/1.1
responses according to RFC2068. |
| KBytes transferred |
 |
This is the amount of data sent during the whole
summary period as reported by the server. Note that some servers
log the size of a document instead of the actual number of bytes
transferred. While in most cases this is the same, if a user
interrupts the transmission by pressing the browser's stop button
before the page has been received completely, some servers (for
example all Netscape web servers) do not log the amount of data
transferred but the amount of data which would have been
transferred if the user would have completely loaded the page. |
| KBytes requested |
¹ |
This is the amount of data requested during the
whole summary period. http-analyze computes this number by
summing up the values of KBytes transferred and KBytes
saved by cache (see below). |
| KBytes saved by cache |
¹ |
The amount of data saved by various caching
mechanisms such as in proxy servers or in browsers. This value is
computed by multiplying the number of Code 304 (Not Modified)
requests per file with the size of the corresponding file. Note:
Because http-analyze can determine the size of a file only
if the file has been requested at least once in the same summary
period, the values for KBytes saved by cache and KBytes
requested are just approximations of the real values. |
| Unique URLs |
|
Unique URLs are the
number of all different, valid URLs requested in a given summary
period. This shows you the number of all different files requested
at least once in the corresponding summary period. |
| Unique sites |
|
This is the sum of all unique hosts accessing the
server during a given time-window . The time-window is hardwired
to the length of the current month. This means that if a host
accesses your server very often, it gets counted only once during
the whole month. Only the sum of the unique hosts per month is
listed in the statistics report. |
| Sessions |
|
Similar to unique sites, this is the
number of unique hosts accessing the server during a given
time-window. This time-window is one day by default for backward
compatibility, but it can be changed with the option -u or
the Session directive in the configuration file. For
example, if the time-window is two hours, all accesses from a
certain host in less than 2 hours after the first access from this
host are lumped together into one session. All following accesses
more than 2 hours apart from the first access will be counted as a
new session. This way you may get an estimated number of how many
sessions are started on different sites to access your server. |
