first day downloads top 300,000

We have many volunteer mirrors that host Firefox downloads and they allow us to keep up with the massive demands our releases create. Without this mirror network, we'd be doomed on release days and maybe even days after the release.

Unfortunately, the mirrors aren't all capable of giving us the same logs on a regular basis (our download stats page accounts for only 7 of our 9 mirrors and doesn't include ftp downloads which traditionally account for another 10%,) so we take the solid information we do get and make some estimates for the mirrors that don't report in as often or at all.

Yesterday, at about mid-day, everyone was asking for some preliminary download stats but we only had logs from one of our 9 mirrors. We used that to make some estimates about what we'd done for downloads in the first half day after the release. Now that we've got our full set of logs in, we've discovered some errors we made in parsing and worked it all out so we can provide some reasonable estimates of the first day's downloads.

For these estimates, we're looking at the total of our 7 logs from yesterday and then doing something like 9*1.1*daily total/7 to estimate in the ftp downloads and the missing two mirrors. This gives us a total of about 312,000 downloads for day one. Not bad. I think we'll start regularly updating our numbers at SpreadFirefox.com each day around 2PM UTC when we've had a change to process all of our available logs. This might change if log delivery times change.

This is only an estimate and it should get better as we bring in more logs from sources like download.com (which is now hosting our windows builds rather than just pointing at our servers.) We'll never have completely accurate stats. It's just not possible unless we're willing to give up the wonderful contributions we get from our mirror network and that's just not worth it for improved statistics. But as our tools for tracking downloads improve, and as our mirror network grows and matures, we'll continue to improve the precision of our estimates and the speed with which we deliver those numbers to the public.

Thanks for your patience while we work all of this out. Check out SpreadFirefox.com and help us on our March to 1 Million downloads.