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« Major Label Copy-Protection Making CDs Incompatible with iPods | Main | Podcast Quicky: Ottmar Liebert's Listening Lounge »iPodderX Distorting Podcast Download StatsJune 20, 2005
The Roadhouse podcast reports that their site has been hit with hundreds of repeated requests from individual copies iPodderX for a single podcast file. According to The Roadhouse site, "iPodderX, Build 148, is ignoring the status codes it receives from a server. The server sends a 'file unchanged' code, yet iPodderX requests the file, regardless. Over and over and over." As a result of this problem, some sites have been hit with excess bandwidth charges for the redundant downloads. Liberated Syndication has received so many redundant requests that it is considering ignoring iPodderX requests for the purposes of its download statistics. According to Liberated Syndication: There is currently a HUGE discrepancy between unique and total IP hits in the tables. If we were to wipe all iPodderX hits from the stats- everyone will notice their numbers going down for this month. Keeping unique is one option- but if we just wiped them all, we're talking about 10,000 unique hits being erased. 10,000 vs 2,000,000 is it worth trying to salvage them? That's what I'm asking for input on. Thus far, there's no official word on a fix from the iPodderX team. The Roadhouse's Tony Steidler-Dennison asks "How long will it take to resolve the issue? Too long already, given the $1100 metered bandwidth bill I incurred in May." Interim Solution Some podcasters are taking the precaution of blocking all requests from the iPodderX client. At the iPodderX forum, dorktones posted this workaround:
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsThis is a little blown out of proportion the bug isn't that big. From a technical standpoint, iPodderX is making a GET request that acts very much like a HEAD request. At most this request downloads an extra 10k per file. It does not download the whole file. Its true that it skews stats and increases load on the server by making these extra requests, but it should not effect the overall bill. I've worked with Dave from Libsyn (who first reported the issue) to figure out what was going on and worked towards a solution. The solution will be found in 3.0.1 that should be out any day now. Posted by: Ray Slakinski at June 21, 2005 06:12 AM Well Ray may think this bug isn't that big but if you rely upon your webserver stats for traffic analyses and billing, it is in fact a big deal. The fact that iPodderX 3.0 is totally distorting stats is a big deal by itself even if there is no billing or metering involved because these stats are used to help make informed decisions on webserver tuning and distribution of content. I decided to just block iPodderX 3.0 build 148 clients hoping that a fix would be imminent and knowing that it would only affect a handful of subscribers. A new build would not kick-in the above rule so everything should be fine by then. And by the way, I do like iPodderX very much. I'm a registered user myself and appreciate the effort Ray and his team put into this app. But still using 2.2.9 for now. Posted by: The Dorktones at June 21, 2005 09:09 AM Great news: Ray and his team just released iPodderX 3.0.1a. The GET request bug seems to be fixed as I have tested it and found no duplicate requests. Now lets hope those 3.0 clients out there will upgrade to 3.0.1a ASAP. Posted by: The Dorktones at June 23, 2005 07:33 AM Post a comment |
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Copyright 2004-5 Podcasting News
Podcasters are reporting that problems with the iPodderX podcast client are creating unnecessary load on their servers, and resulting in a distorted view of how popular some podcasts are.