Talk:Statistics

I may not have understood the yum method correctly, but as far as I can tell, the IPs are only unique per release version. I.e. if I install F12 on a system with a static IP, do updates, then wipe it and install F13 instead and do updates to that, my IP gets counted as unique in both the F12 and the F13 number. Thus the total across releases is not really the number of unique IPs.

Jef Spaleta estimated the total number of Fedora clients to be 16 million in May 2009. If the non-smolt-corrected number is now 22 million, Fedora has had a nearly 40 % increase in installed base over the past year. That doesn't seem quite realistic. --mhuhtala 2010-06-08

The sum of IP addresses at the right of that chart could be misleading, and I've been considering dropping it. However, the total IP address count is unique across all releases. So the case you mention above would not be counted twice in that number. --pfrields 14:52, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Then it seems that the Statistics/Commands page doesn't quite describe the whole method. It clearly counts unique IPs per release, and the total (22 million) number is exactly the sum of the per-release numbers. If the total sum is unique IPs only, are the addresses that downloaded F12 excluded from F13, and so on? If not, how can you just add the numbers together without taking overlap into account? --mhuhtala Jun 9 12:35:18 UTC 2010

It is not exactly the sum of the per-release numbers, which you can check for yourself by adding the figured shown in the chart -- they total well over 27,000,000 without counting Rawhide. An IP address that pulls updates from F12 and F13 is counted only once. --pfrields 01:52, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Ooops, my mistake, sorry. I did the sum and thought I got the 22 million number exactly, but on recount I get 27 million. I probably missed one release from the sum on the first attempt. --mhuhtala Jun 10 04:59:13 UTC 2010

On a second thought, maybe a time-based number would give a better idea of the current active user base. E.g. the number of unique IPs that have fetched yum updates in the last 12 or 18 months regardless of release version. This would include even updates to EOLed releases (people booting up their Fedoras after a hiatus and getting updates to an EOLed system). --mhuhtala Jun 9 12:44:21 UTC 2010

That is one way of counting, certainly. It excludes people who install and do not regularly update at all, and has a few other drawbacks but it's no more flawed than anything else I've seen. I'll try to pull these numbers when I get time to write some more scripts for them. --pfrields 01:52, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

One could easily add all the ISO downloader / network installer IPs over the same time period, regardless of release, to the set of yum updaters. Of course, that might still exclude someone who got the N-3 release and uses it but never updates or adds a package. --mhuhtala Jun 10 04:59:13 UTC 2010