[Icecast] help on listener connection stats

[Chris Howard]

Thanks for the insight.
I'm keeping an eye on my logs and I think I'm getting a better
feel for my traffic.  I still see "listener_connection"
going up for some unknown reason.

And the "Bose..." thing seems to connect every hour at
around the half-hour mark (x:30) and listen for 10 minutes
and then drop off.  The IP addresses change but they
are all Amazon Web Services in Virginia.
I wish I knew what that was about.  The regularity of
it feels more like a robot of some sort than a real listener.
And our programming pattern at the half-hour mark is not
anything predictable.


Chris Howard
wmfh-lp.org



On 4/15/2017 2:56 PM, Jeroen van Oosten wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 15-04-17 15:19, Chris Howard wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I see two statistics on the admin web page.
>>
>> On my system "listeners" is usually 0.  Sometimes I will
>> actually catch it at 1 or 2, but it is 0 99% of the time.
> 
> That is the current number of listeners.
> 
>> On the other hand "listener_connections" is always
>> going up.  If I refresh the screen it goes up by a few.
>> If I wait an hour and refresh it goes up by tens.
>> Over a few days it goes up by hundreds.
>>
>> What is this telling me?
> That is the total number of times somebody connected to your stream. If
> your restart your icecast server you will see that the number drops back
> to zero. In itself it is not a very useful number, IMO.
> 
>> In pursuit of this question I started looking at the
>> logs a little bit.  I see a lot of connections
>> happening, particular from a Bose Streaming Service
>> (something like that) which can show 5-6 log entries
>> in one second.  What's up with that?
> Is your station listed in a directory of online radio stations? It could
> be someone is trying to connect to your stream with their home system or
> internet radio, but failing to stream it (perhaps it doesn't understand
> your encoding format).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jeroen van Oosten
> 
>