Are Your Stats Bugging Out? Read This:

[ Originally posted at http://forum.libsyn.com/viewtopic.php?t=7743 ]

Friends,

I know the latest stats issues are causing a bit of an uproar, so I am pulling my head out from under the hood for a minute to explain what's going on.

We have discovered some bugs in the new collection service we put into place around the 23rd of July. (The collection service is the piece of the stats system that feeds the raw hits into a queue to be analyzed by the 'stats-engine'). We've been tracking these issues for a few weeks, and are fully aware that there is a serious problem with the numbers you are seeing. Some people are reporting super high spikes, others are seeing numbers that are way too low. Some see a combination of both, and still others are not getting stats data on some files at all.

We are currently peeling back the layers to find and repair the bugs that have caused these problems. Admittedly, we were probably a bit hasty in pushing the new collection service into production so fast. The old service, however, was on its last leg and could no longer scale to the level of demand being placed on it, so we felt like we had to make the leap. It's probably safe to say that we didn't quite stick that landing.

The good news is, we have isolated and repaired a number of obscure bugs. We have also narrowed the field on a major issue that is causing the collection service to intermittently crash (which can cause you to see low points, followed by extremely high points in your daily numbers).

Once we have routed out the last of these bugs, we have plans to COMPLETELY RESTORE the past data from ~7/23 to present. That is to say, we are going to roll the system back in time to the 23rd, and re-run the numbers going forward. This will eliminate the erratic reporting you've witnessed in the past weeks, and should restore the normal trends that you're used to seeing for your shows.

We know this is extremely frustrating for many of you, It is for us as well. While we've come a long way in the past few years, we are still learning to manage and scale a system of this size. So if you can find it in you, we'd really appreciate your patience and support as we work this one out.

Thank you, sincerely,

Marty