Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2015 16:24:37 -0400

We are a publisher and wish to count downloads by subscriber ip address. Inspection of the Apache logfile is discouraging. Some browsers seem to issue a request for the entire document (easy to count, the return code in the log file is 200), some make multiple requests for parital content (return code 206) and some do both for the same document at nearly the same time. That is, first request the entire document, and then a series of partial requests. I don't know how common that is, but we can reproduce the behavior with Firefox at least.

Can anyone refer us to either 1) software that can provide a proper count or 2) information about how to process the log to obtain an accurate count?

We have studied the "Counter" website and found software to analyze counter-compatible logs, but no software to create them from standard Apache logs. It appears that creating such software would be a major undertaking.

Thanks for you attention

Daniel Feenberg
NBER