Hits are ridculously high

Angela French

11 years ago
updated 11 years ago
Answered

We have version 4.1 where I work and this is my first experience working with it.
I am trying to get a report that will allow me to gauge the use of the PDFs on our site. I set a time range for this first 10 days of Oct. and filtered it for just .pdf. I also "included" just the IP addresses for our office. In the report, I got what seems like an extraordinary number of hits on my PDFs. We are a small state agency with only 150 employees. There is no way we had 28,795 hits on our top document in 10 days. What might I be overlooking?

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Michael

11 years ago

Large number of hits (including a large number of incomplete requests) is usual for PDF files, as Adobe Reader usually makes multiple requests to server to show one PDF file. In most cases you should use the number of visitors instead of number of hits to estimate number of downloads for these files.

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In looking at the report, there are 28,795 hits for the most downloaded PDF with 1,148 visitors for that document. Does that sound reasonable? The document is 12MB with 142 pages, so it is quite large. But 25 hits to the server per person?

Some our customers reported similar statistics on large PDF files, so it can be correct. You should also check the number of incomplete requests for these files. If it is very large (e.g. 90% or more of all hits), it is a good indication that the large number of hits is indeed caused by the way Adobe Reader works.