Monitoring and Controlling Usage

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Overview and Tutorial Introduction Quick Tutorial
Pre-Installation Site Configuration Installation Installing LDM Upgrading Removing Post-Installation Speed, Security and Server Load Uploads, Downloads and Media Filetypes
Administration Introduction Control Settings Permissions Controlling Access Monitoring and Controlling Usage Database Imports and Exports Content Overview/Mass Editing Entry Attributes Where are Files Stored?
Moderation Introduction Design Layout and Design Advanced vbAdvanced Subscriptions Add-on Extras Media Players Mirrors Synchronising Categories and Directories Hacking LDM Search Engine Optimisation
Other Known Bugs Common Problems Wish List Version History Acknowledgements

Contents 1 Monitoring Usage: Features for Users 2 Monitoring Usage: Features for Administrators 2.1 Detailed Access Information 2.2 Warning - Server Load 3 Controlling Usage: User Allowances 3.1 Download Quotas 3.2 Transfer Rates 3.3 Upload Quotas 3.4 Setting Quotas 3.5 Registered and Unregistered Users 3.6 Resetting An Individual's Download Quotas 4 Other Ways of Controlling Access

Monitoring Usage: Features for Users

These features help your users discover the use being made of LDM:

• LDM menu items Show What's Hot and Show What's New, which take the user to pages listing popular and recent items
• The *hit count* listed next to each entry on the main LDM pages
• The optional summaries of popular and recent entries on the LDM home page and category pages, displayed by using the LDM settings show_hit_parade, days_seen_on_portal and links_seen_on_portal
• The summaries of access and bandwidth use made available by installing the ldm_tot module on your vbAdvanced portal

Monitoring Usage: Features for Administrators

The following features help the administrator:

• The LDM->Administer->Hits and LDM->Administer->Allowances pages give information on what is going on
• The profile_ldmactivity option on the Admin/Setting page allows you to include a list of each user's entries and accesses as part of their User Profile
• The link next to entries' *hit counts* on LDM listings leads to a itemised list of the users who have accessed/downloaded the entry

The summary statistics provided in the left column of all LDM->Administer pages include:

• Hits and bandwidth during last 24 hours
• Categories and entries, including numbers requiring moderation and known to be broken, invalid, or duplicates
• Thumbnail images
• File uploads
• Top users
• Keywords

Other links on LDM->Administer pages are used to carry out related administrative tasks such as:

• revalidating the database, i.e. checking that entries exist and are 'alive'
• forcing a rebuild of all thumbnails

Detailed Access Information

Each LDM entry records how many times it has been hit or visited. Users with can_view_hits permission see this information within the main LDM linkbits and, by clicking the icon near the hit count, can find out who accessed the entry.

LDM->Administer->Hits provides detailed usage reports. Reports drill down to show hits on individual entries; by individual users; organised by date, entry, username and IP address; and over selected periods. Analyses can be downloaded as .csv files for further analysis using tools like Excel.

Warning - Server Load

The database table holding information on accesses and downloads can grow very large. It is good practice to trim the table on a regular basis. This can be done automatically, by setting prune_downloadtable, or manually, by selecting the delete option on the LDM/Admin/Hits page.

Take care to strike a balance in clearing download histories. Doing this too rigorously may prevent desired features from working properly:

• When the downloads table has been truncated in this way, it is no longer possible to obtain a detailed analysis of the use of LDM before the cut-off date. Individual entries will retain a record of the number of times each has been hit, but you can no longer find out who accessed the entries prior to the date to which you have pruned.
• If you base users' bandwidth and download allowances on (for example) their weekly access, you must retain full records for at least seven days.

Equally, failing to clean the hits table periodically does affect server performance on heavily-used sites, after the table has grown to record many thousands of hits.

Controlling Usage: User Allowances

By default, any authorised user can make unlimited use of LDM. You can change this by setting quotas on downloads and uploads using the LDM->Administer->Allowances page and by using the settings on the LDM->Administer->Settings page. Download quotas restrict the number of files, the total number of bytes that members of the usergroup can download over a given time period (by default, the last 24 hours). With effect from version 3.0.2, quotas can also limit the maximum transfer rate permitted for downloads. Upload quotas restrict the total size of the files a user has uploaded at a given time.

Download Quotas

These quotas apply when accessing (downloading or playing):

• any files that LDM considers to be downloads (i.e. with filetypes that appear in the VB attachments table)
• any files that do not include a hostname,
• when using the mirror feature, any files that are delivered from a mirror server.

Quotas do not apply if the file delivery is not handled within LDM, i.e.:

• when accessing external links
• when force_redirect is set to 2

In other words, requests to access:

• /file.xyz are always counted against allowances
• http://mysite/file.xyz are only counted if xyz is listed in the attachments table.

Download quotas have associated time periods, for example 1 day or 5 days, over which accesses are accumulated. Whenever a user tries to access an entry, LDM will check access backwards for that length of time. As example, consider the situation when the daily limit is 10 Mbytes. At:

* 09:00 - user downloads 2 MBytes - OK (total 2 MBytes)
* 14:00 - user downloads 3 MBytes - OK (total 5 MBytes) 
* 18:00 - user downloads 4 MBytes - OK (total 9 MBytes)
* 19:00 - user tries to download 3 MBytes - Blocked (would take the total over 10 MBytes)
* 20:00 - user downloads 0.5 MBytes - OK (total 9.5 MBytes)
* 09:01 - 24 hour total is now 7.5 MBytes
* 14:01 - 24 hour total is now 5.5 MBytes  
* 15:00 - user downloads 3 MBytes - OK (total 8.5 MBytes)

Transfer Rates

Transfer rate limits are available in version 3.0.2 onwards. These apply when accessing (downloading or playing) the files listed above. The specified rates are maxima - actual file transfer rates depend on factors that are outside LDM's control, such as server load, other network traffic, etc.

Upload Quotas

Upload limits restrict the total disk space that can be occupied by a user's uploads. The total space that can be occupied by all users' uploads is capped at the value given in setting upload_maxspace.

Setting Quotas

Go to the LDM->Administer->Allowances page.

Quotas for files downloaded, bytes downloaded and total bytes uploaded are set per usergroup. A user's quota depends on her primary usergroup.

In the illustration, members of the Registered usergroup can download no more than 10 files and 5 Mbytes over a ten day period. Whenever a user tries to make a new download, LDM will check her usage during that period, and will block the download if the new transfer will take them over their quota. If quotas are set on both files and bytes transferred, the first limit reached will trigger the block. Users are unblocked as soon as their access in the immediately preceeding period drops below the quota limit.

You can restrict quotas to apply only within certain of your LDM categories by combining the can_bypass_bandwidth_limits permissions setting with download and bandwidth allowances. Specify the required allowances globally and then turn can_bypass_bandwidth_limits permission on/off on a per-category basis.

Registered and Unregistered Users

Download allowances for registered usergroups apply to the username, normally irrespective of where they access LDM. Allowances for the unregistered usergroup apply to the IP address, i.e. normally the physical computer. If you set allowances for the unregistered usergroup, downloads by one unregistered user will not affect other unregistered users unless they happen to be using the same computer or share the same external IP address (e.g. because they share the same router).

A side effect is that unregistered users can get themselves a new allowance by going to a computer on a different network.

Another possible side effect, which is that registered users can get a new allowance by signing up for multiple accounts, can be partially prevented by selecting the 'Count all accesses from user's IP address against that user's allowances' box on the allowances admin page.

Resetting An Individual's Download Quotas

If necessary, you can restore individual user's quotas by deleting the records of their existing downloads. Go to the LDM->Administer->Hits page, select a period of interest (e.g. the last day) and sort by username. Drill down into the hit records for the user concerned, and delete relevant hits.

When you delete records of downloads in this way, detailed information on these accesses is lost, although the entries themselves will retain a correct cumulative access count.

Other Ways of Controlling Access

A number of extras are provided with the LDM release (see directory /release/extras/limit-access), which can be used to limit user access:

• To limit how many times a user can access an entry
• To limit access until users have posted sufficiently in your forums
• To control users' access according to their reputation
• To give certain users different allowances than their usergroup