If user uses "http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo"
as the update site URL, wouldn't it require eclipse.org to be up already?
Are we not introducing a new single point of failure?
Can p2 retrieve the feature definition
from the domain where the site URL is, and then use mirrors to download the
bundle binaries? There should be no redirect outside of update
site URL that lives behind firewalls, right?
Tacking update stats via update manager is important to
the BIRT project to gauge adoption. While the absolute number might not be
accurate, the trend can be used as an indication of adoption growth or decline.
BIRT project was able to get update manager download stats in
Callisto/Europa/Ganymede. Update manager stats stops only since
Genymede SR1 (Oct. 2008), and Bugzilla 251907
was logged on October 23, 2008.
Wenfeng
From: cross-project-issues-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cross-project-issues-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John
Arthorne
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2009 2:21 PM
To: Cross project issues
Subject: Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Download stats and p2
I just want to
emphasize how risky it is to be attempting this at this point in our release.
The single point of failure problem is quite significant - not only making
downloads from Galileo repositories impossible if eclipse.org is unresponsive,
but also adding round-trips through the Ottawa-based Foundation servers which
could add significant overhead to install times for users in China, for
example. In practice very few public or corporate mirrors will figure out how
to "turn off" this rerouting, especially in the short term near the
release. This means some very large coporate mirror traffic will soon be
redirected your way, which in the past never would have hit the foundation
servers. You may get the stats you want, at the expense of people having to
wait a few weeks after the release before downloads become usable (and
completely breaking corporate mirrors that live behind firewalls that won't
permit redirecting outside).
This
"single file hack" was possible in Update Manager as well for
gathering download stats, but it was never used in the Callisto/Europa
simultaneous releases (just look for references to download.php in the site.xml
for previous release train sites). So after three simultaneous releases with no
such stats, I'm wondering why it is so urgent to attempt introducing this
roughly a week before the release date. It seems to me if members of the Board
have technical requirements, their best route is to fund developers to work on
them early in the release cycle, rather than requesting lask minute hacks that
will put the entire release at risk.
John
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Wayne
Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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06/12/2009
02:51 PM
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Subject
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[cross-project-issues-dev]
Download stats and p2
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Greetings all. We have a small problem.
Actually, I guess that the
problem is as big as you choose to decide it is...
The Eclipse Foundation tracks downloads that go through the download.php
script:
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=[...]
This includes things like the packages and direct downloads provided by
projects (assuming that everybody is using the script in their download
links).
Downloads that occur through p2 do not go through this script. They go
directly to our download server and to our mirrors. The mirrors do not
(and arguably cannot reasonably) provide us with download stats.
So... if somebody, for example, downloads the "Eclipse IDE for PHP
Developers" we will know that we have one more download of PDT. If
they
instead download the "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" and then
use p2
to add PDT to their configuration, we currently do not have any way of
tracking that download of PDT.
Inability to accurately track downloads is a huge concern for the
Eclipse Board.
We have explored several mechanisms for tracking this download.
Unfortunately, we've not been holding these conversations as publicly as
I'd like, so I'll summarize them briefly below...
1. Get mirrors to give us their download stats. We could ask. But most
will not give them to us. Besides, their logs probably contain
information about everything they mirror, which will be way more
information than we need. And it'll be a heck of a lot of information
for our webmasters to weed through.
2. Add a plug-in that gathers information from p2 post install and send
that information to eclipse.org. Effectively, this is a call-home
mechanism that will require some additional UI elements and considerable
effort awfully late in our development cycle. Ultimately, it will
require some kind of opt-in from the user; many of whom will refuse
leaving us with incomplete data. FWIW, we could use the UDC for this,
but it has the same problem.
3. All p2 downloads go through eclipse.org. Denis is concerned that the
download.php script and--to some degree--the rest of our infrastructure
will not be able to scale to handle the value that can potentially come
from p2 downloads. FWIW, we're not increasing our bandwidth for Galileo;
instead, we're depending very heavily on mirrors.
Bug 239668 [1] has been open for some time to discuss this issue.
We've decided that the best approach is something that we've been
calling the "Single File Hack". In this hack, we configure the p2
metadata (artifacts.xml) to send requests for some small subset of the
files to eclipse.org. Ideally, we send requests for one plug-in or
feature for each thing that we need to track. The number of files needs
to be kept relatively small.
There are problems with this hack. For one, eclipse.org becomes a single
point of failure for all downloads. Further, we will have to let
organizations that mirror our downloads for internal consumption know
how to turn it off.
What we're going to need from each project is the names of the files
that we need to be tracking.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Wayne
[1]https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=239668
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