Viewers display on hosting is messed up

[EfficiencyVI]

I wanted to know why sometimes the number of viewers displayed from hosts are so different to the actual number of viewers. So I started a little experiment. I set up 3 servers with one viewer each. They are real viewers with a firefox browser running in the frame buffer. Then I started to host people. This is the result:

[05:10am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting spartanscotsmn for 1 viewer(s).
[06:29am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting thepistilpacker for 0 viewer(s).
[08:29am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting hazleton for 0 viewer(s).
[09:51am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting mikaelalm for 0 viewer(s).
[11:06am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting thepixelpirate for 0 viewer(s).
[11:18am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting llo115 for 3 viewer(s).
[11:52am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting rykona for 2 viewer(s).
[12:44pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting leavaris for 2 viewer(s).
[12:49pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting silaqui_greyhawke for 0 viewer(s).
[02:08pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting rosiegocrazy for 0 viewer(s).
[03:24pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting mr_bo_jenkins for 0 viewer(s).
[04:36pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting lokbatch for 0 viewer(s).
[05:57pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting breezeblocks13 for 0 viewer(s).
[06:57pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting itanshi for 0 viewer(s).
[07:28pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting breezeblocks13 for 0 viewer(s).
[09:07pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting vash505 for 0 viewer(s).
[11:07pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting missrubyfalls for 0 viewer(s).
[11:49pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting agent_j_mib for 0 viewer(s).
[01:26am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting roguesdad for 2 viewer(s).
[02:34am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting roguesdad for 0 viewer(s).
[02:37am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting beardageddon for 1 viewer(s).
[03:56am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting fate78 for 3 viewer(s).
[05:56am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting oisketchio for 2 viewer(s).
[07:43am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting mikaelalm for 3 viewer(s).
[08:49am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting friskyfloyd for 2 viewer(s).
[09:48am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting jojorawr for 3 viewer(s).
[10:50am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting lindsaystone for 2 viewer(s).
[12:11pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting roy_reaper for 1 viewer(s).
[01:26pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting rykona for 2 viewer(s).
[02:34pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting rosiegocrazy for 1 viewer(s).
[03:49pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting itanshi for 0 viewer(s).
[04:54pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting kingtuthmosis for 2 viewer(s).
[06:39pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting g4ivl3_0v3r for 2 viewer(s).
[07:54pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting soulmerge for 1 viewer(s).
[09:23pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting mirroredminds for 0 viewer(s).
[11:23pm] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting breezeblocks13 for 1 viewer(s).
[12:14am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting rubyrach for 2 viewer(s).
[02:14am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting itanshi for 2 viewer(s).
[03:40am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting willowmvp for 2 viewer(s).
[04:51am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting night_affinity for 1 viewer(s).
[06:32am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting mikaelalm for 2 viewer(s).
[07:17am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting spartanscotsmn for 1 viewer(s).
[09:04am] info: [#efficiencyvi] Now hosting kamikazes33x for 3 viewer(s).

All clients work on perfect conditions. There were not crashes, restarts, internet drops nor any other problem. They had perfect “watch conditions”. Still the numbers displayed are completely random. Can anyone explain that to me?

Also I watched the viewer counter on the hosted channel and the viewers always went up by 3 viewers so the hostings were working. I also checked with VNC.

[EfficiencyVI]

Well, I found my answer … when a hosting is applied the users load a special file on the page and these “viewer” are counted. The problem is that aren’t users. that are just people that load this file. So if I want to, I could produce “Now hosting for 1000 viewer(s)” if I wanted to.

However your timeout is too short. The hosting command is pushed to the client, but depending on the latency and on the device itself it usually takes much longer to host a channel. So in average over multiple days you can say that only 60 % or less of all real viewers are counted. I would suggest that the timeout should be higher to make the results much more reliable. For the hosted channel it does not make a difference if he gets the message 5 seconds later but it can be really annoying for a hosting channel when you have 100 viewers and only 60 are counted for the hosting.

And there is still another problem with the hosting. See this log:

18:17 Now hosting GeezertheGozerian.
18:18 geezerthegozerian has gone offline. Exiting host mode.
18:20 Now hosting tlovetech.
18:28 geezerthegozerian has gone offline. Exiting host mode.

Anybody seeing the problem here?

And this problem is not new as I reported it over 2 weeks ago, see … https://twitter.com/Efficiency_VI/status/659356325315407872

[EfficiencyVI]

bump

[night]

This forum is for third party developer support, not reporting website bugs. To report a Twitch bug, head to http://www.twitch.tv/bug_reports/new

[EfficiencyVI]

@night Thanks! That would be the first time I got an answer on that form.