Re: Data about rate of downloads

On Tuesday 06 June 2006 19:29, Ilir Gashi wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Ilir Gashi and I am a PhD student at the Centre for Software
> Reliability, City University, London, UK. I was wondering if anyone can
> help me with the following question:
>
> - Are the numbers of downloads of a particular release of the PostgreSQL
> server recorded anywhere centrally, and if (at least approximatly) these
> numbers are known, can they be shared?
>

We don't really track it thoroughly... looking at some numbers we've had ~
60,000 downloads of 8.1 since 8.1.4 was released... but that only people who
have gone through our main website... a lot of people get updates through
thier OS vendor (ports,apt-get,yum,etc...) and a fair number also go directly
into an ftp server or website.

> We are interested on doing some research on how much the classical Software
> Reliability Growth models can be used for Reliability predictions of a
> server based on the bug reports for that server and the download rates.
> This work would form some part of my PhD thesis and, since we are an
> academic insitution, all the work and findings would be made available
> freely.
>

I doubt they could for open source projects, unless those projects had very
tight control over thier distribution (which is kind of self defeating).
Smaller projects on places like pgfoundry might be able to track this (slony
comes to mind), but for us it seems doubtful.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL