Arduino about to hit "10.000.000 downloads" only it's page hits - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: alexanderbrevig
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 08:32:56 am
content: So, while I've been paying attention this last day - according to their counter - they've served ~10010 Terabytes of data.Seems unlikely?Agreed.So, do this:Refresh this a couple of times:https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/SoftwareAnd I will guarantee you that this counterhttps://www.arduino.cc/download_handler.php?getCountwill increaseat leastas much.Don't know why it bothers me, but it does. It's a straight out lie to call it downloads when it's probably mostly robots visiting the download page.EDIT: made a mistake, it's 10 tera, not a 100 (forgot to check the math) - still way too much for a day worth of downloads

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 09:26:05 am
content: I don't see any causation between reloading that page and counter increase. I can just wait the same amount of time and refresh the counter, counter increase will be about the same. Or I can refresh download page 10 times but counter will increase only by half of that, just because of the time delay I spent on refreshing.QuoteNot so much, frankly.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 09:43:41 am
content: When thinking about 10 million downloads. What is population of earth, 7 billion. Then it gets to 1 download per 700 people. Considering that one person can download multiple times and the amount of cheap Chinese arduino clones in the wild, this figure does not seem strange for me.

author: alexanderbrevig
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 10:04:29 am
content: 100 Terabyte bandwidth for one day don't seem much to you?I'll remember to hire you if I need a godaddy set up

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 10:12:41 am
content: Quote from: alexanderbrevig on September 13, 2016, 10:04:29 amWhere it or your post says it's a daily counter? And the speed of it's rise does not suggest it can get 10 million counts even in month.

author: alexanderbrevig
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 10:25:08 am
content: Quote from: alexanderbrevig on September 13, 2016, 08:32:56 amI apologize for the hard to parse sentence. I can see how it was not clear.It was a simple matter of multiplying the difference in count from time A to time B with the average size of the downloads.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 10:28:25 am
content: Ok, so it'sQuoteConsidering 84 MB size, it's 833.5 terabytes during those 1.5 years result in about 1.5 TB per day.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 10:30:13 am
content: 10 million sounds right.Many people would have downloaded it several times over the years.Countless clones etc.

author: alexanderbrevig
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 10:34:27 am
content: Yes, only the download was much bigger before they added the board manager and things like that.It's an unnatural increase in counter speed for this final push toward 10mill.I just found it interesting, for me when I test there still is a strong correlation between refreshes and the count.When it was braught to my attention I made a script and this happened:I will bet a lot of money most of those hits are from my script. Seems to average around 18k per day, so 81k/16h is definitly an anomaly.It's only interesting to me, don't mean to come off like this is important or a huge conspiracy.

author: LabSpokane
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2016, 05:08:24 pm
content: 10 million sounds completely plausible. And if you don't like Arduino.cc's download count, why don't you demand a refund?Oh, that's right, you didn't pay for the software in the first place.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2016, 01:07:18 am
content: I've personally downloaded it at least 5 times across multiple computers - call it spoiled by fast internet. In the old days, I would have downloaded it once and saved it on my server, and installed it on other computers from that one download. Now, I just download things I need and only save some of the really big things that would take significant time to download. So I can easily believe that the Arduino IDE has been downloaded 10 million times.

author: dr.diesel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2016, 01:35:08 am
content: And that counter doesn't include all of the installations from Linux repos.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2016, 03:27:45 am
content: It sounds like a lot of data, but they are hosted on Amazon and the cost is less then the cost of hiring one employee. It is all very manageable.

author: Seekonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2016, 02:12:19 pm
content: Could be the noobs have to download it ten times before they figure out how to make it work.

author: Nerull
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 20, 2016, 08:53:33 pm
content: This seems...strangely obsessive. It sounds like you've got some issues.Arduino is very popular. 10 million downloads is fairly plausible.For comparison, they've sold over 10 million Raspberry Pi's, for which the market is not flooded with cheap clones.Websites with millions of hits per day are now so bloated that the webpage itself is several megabytes, before any media. Can you imagine how much bandwidth that is?

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 20, 2016, 10:41:01 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on September 13, 2016, 10:28:25 amQuote from: amspire on November 18, 2016, 03:27:45 amYou can rent dedicated servers with 1 gbps unmetered internet connections for about $100-130 euro a month, and that would basically give you about 300 TB of bandwidth each month, or about 30 TB a day. Here's an example:https://www.leaseweb.com/bare-metal-server/configure/24570#contract-containerIn this particular case, a CDN may be a good solution to use for small periods of time right after a new version of the software is released when you're going to have a burst of downloads for a few days, but afterwards it may make more sense to rely on your own servers.For example, a CDN would charge something like 5 US cents per GB of delivered content, so for 1.5 TB a day, you'd pay $90-100 a day with CDNs, or around $3000 a month. You could literally rent half a rack with a 1gbps unmetered connection for less than $2000 .. put a bunch of servers there to serve your files directly from ram or from a SSD and you're done (though you'd make your service vulnerable to ddos attacks).Anyway, it's a shame they don't offer torrents for the latest releases. They could make a single torrent for the latest release, with each operating system and 32/64 bit versions in separate folders, so users could select and download all or just one

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 20, 2016, 11:22:52 pm
content: They are on Amazon and I think without CDN, since I got the same IP address from Australia and the US. They are also enforcing HTTPS so they cannot take advantage of local ISPs caches.But as I said, the Amazon traffic cost is less then the wage of one employee so it is manageable.The download quantity is probably lower then I would expect seeing that since March 2015, there have been 11 versions released, and for each version, there are separate downloads for Windows, 32 bit Linux, 64 bit Linux and MAC. I am not a big Arduino user, but I have probably downloaded 3 or 4 times over the period. A keen user may have downloaded all 11 releases for multiple platforms.It is definitely not the case that there have been 10 million new users over the year. Perhaps 1 million new users. Basically every time someone buys a cheap $5 Arduino clone on eBay or Aliexpress, they are going to download the latest development kit fron Arduino.cc.

author: alexanderbrevig
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 21, 2016, 07:38:11 am
content: Yeeeah, I had forgotten about this thread.Here's my apology for starting a negative and speculative thread.I've probably used Arduino as much as any here and have a lot oflibraries online. There's also the fact I've been on the wrong side ofthe untold history of Arduino, as a core memeber ofWiring.You also used to be able to get to me atalex@arduino.org(I knew about the merger at the time so .cc / .org had nothing to do with this).This whole thing was just me noticing the counter behave in a weird way, and I found it interesting. I'm sorry I did not stop to think if it really was for anyone else, and for marinating it in my personal frustration with thecompany.I love and promote the idea and the framework behind Arduino, whenever it's appropriate (and admittedly maybe sometimes when it's not).Correlation doesn't imply causation, I know this - and should not have made this thread.