What is the format of the data returned by the SHOW CTR command.
 
        James
 
 
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Suggestion
Author:  Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> at SMTP
Date:    4/3/96 6:14 PM
 
 
On Wed, 3 Apr 1996 09:35:19 EST David Avery <[log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>And every  year my  boss says  the same thing  about listserv:  how many
>lists? how many subscribers?
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> list sum listserv.dartmouth.edu
   List membership summary for selected servers known to
          LISTSERV@SEARN on 3 Apr 1996 18:14:41
 
                         Number of lists   Membership count
Nodeid                   Public    Total   Public     Total
------                   ------    -----   ------     -----
LISTSERV.DARTMOUTH.EDU       39       68    18359     22072
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
>how many in the local domain?
 
Here you do  have to write your own program.  Typically managers will ask
how many are in this and that  department and it is not a straightforward
issue that the product can anticipate easily.
 
>how many postings to each list? how many bounces on each list?
 
Per-list statistics will be available in a future version. Note that they
aren't available on VM either, except  for the STATS command that reports
the total  number of postings  since the creation  of the list,  which is
only very moderately useful.
 
>how much cpu did it consume? how much disk and ram?
 
THAT is  something your  operating system  should tell  you. I  mean, you
wouldn't ask your users to tell you  how much CPU they've consumed so you
can bill them, would you? :-)
 
>He can't believe we are buying a  product to manage mailing lists and we
>can't  even guess  at  the  number of  subscribers  we  service and  the
>frequency of their postings.
 
You have 68  lists totalling 22,072 subscribers. The  server keeps global
usage statistics, you can retrieve raw numbers using the SHOW CTR command
and process them into a report, or you can use a report generator someone
else wrote:
 
                                  Total       Daily average
 
Postings to mailing lists:        11390          379.66
Recipients:                     3064711       102157.03
 
Digests issued:                     941           31.38
Recipients:                      321924        10730.80
Indexes issued:                       0            0.00
Recipients:                           0            0.00
 
DISTRIBUTE jobs processed:        29241          974.69
Internally generated:             28724          957.46
 
Outbound DISTRIBUTE jobs:         70148         2338.27
Outbound NJE files:                 517           17.23
Outbound files to MAILER:        120119         4003.97
In non-BSMTP format:              69576         2319.19
Recipients:                     3034547       101151.57
 
379.66/68 = 5.58 posting per day on the average.
 
You'll  probably  ask  why  LISTSERV doesn't  include  a  quality  report
generator to convince management to spend  more money on the product, and
you'll be right. It would be more profitable for L-Soft to have postponed
the delivery  of the file server  functions for non-VM systems,  and have
spent the  time developing  a state  of the  art reporting  system giving
managers all the metrics they need to  send more money our way. If enough
people feel this way, I am willing to freeze further development until we
have  the  necessary reporting  tools  in  place.  If  this is  what  our
customers want, we will do it.
 
  Eric