Crystal Web ADSL performance feedback thread Part 3...

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Icemanbrfc said:
Aah okay thanks... Some strange things happening at CW. Wonder what is happening. Hopefully they can get it sorted.
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Well, this one is different from the two others as this leak is the result of someone at Crystal Web doing careless programming and then pushing the code changes live without reviewing or testing them. Awful programming practices, of course, but considering the size of Crystal Web, their software development team probably just consists of one of their managers doing some changes whenever it's necessary.
 
Some more interesting numbers, for those who like that sort of thing.

The total data volume of today's emails is 630MB. So just sending out the data usage emails cost Crystal Web 630MB of data today.
 
What an odd thing to happen. I must say, it's frustrating that it's now the 5th and I still have no way to check on my normal vs. uncapped account usage. I just want the old emails back.
 
How many strike outs can an ISP have before people start questioning ethics? CW still look like a fly by night with all these minor problems.
 
new_in_za2 said:
Some more interesting numbers, for those who like that sort of thing.

The total data volume of today's emails is 630MB. So just sending out the data usage emails cost Crystal Web 630MB of data today.
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How do you work this out?

My message is 219KB, just FYI.
 
PostManPat said:
How many strike outs can an ISP have before people start questioning ethics? CW still look like a fly by night with all these minor problems.
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Unfortunately, it's either great performance but weird **** with CW, or crappy performance with less weird **** with other ISP's. I know which one I've decided on. It's the lesser of 2 evils.
 
Ho3n3r said:
How do you work this out?

My message is xxKB, just FYI.
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You might want to edit the kB number out of your message, or it will be possible to rougly figure out which Crystal Web username corresponds to your forum account.

Well, first I calculated the size of the total leak. I did this by measuring my own username's placement in the previous two leaks to get an idea of how big the current leak is. When measuring the previous leaks, I came out with very close to the same fraction on both leaks. Dividing the amount of usernames received in today's email by this fraction gave me a good estimate of how many accounts were leaked today, and thus also how many emails were sent.

Each email contains information about the user in question, and all users before that user alphabetically. So the first email contains information for one user, the second email contains information for two users, and so forth, up to the number of accounts leaked today. thus 1+2+...+n, which is a total of 1730730. Then I took the size of the email I received, minus all headers, and divided it by the number of accounts contained in my email, which gives the average size of the information for a single account. This number was then multiplied by 1730730 for a total of 630MB.
 
new_in_za2 said:
You mean that you got a usage email, but it just contained your own info, and only your own info?

If so, then I (still) guess that today's leak only contains capped accounts.
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That is exactly it, received a usage mail like normal, but it only contained my own information.



So yeah, definitely looks like a capped account issue, happened to my friend as well.
 
new_in_za2 said:
You might want to edit the kB number out of your message, or it will be possible to rougly figure out which Crystal Web username corresponds to your forum account.

Well, first I calculated the size of the total leak. I did this by measuring my own username's placement in the previous two leaks to get an idea of how big the current leak is. When measuring the previous leaks, I came out with very close to the same fraction on both leaks. Dividing the amount of usernames received in today's email by this fraction gave me a good estimate of how many accounts were leaked today, and thus also how many emails were sent.

Each email contains information about the user in question, and all users before that user alphabetically. So the first email contains information for one user, the second email contains information for two users, and so forth, up to the number of accounts leaked today. thus 1+2+...+n, which is a total of 1730730. Then I took the size of the email I received, minus all headers, and divided it by the number of accounts contained in my email, which gives the average size of the information for a single account. This number was then multiplied by 1730730 for a total of 630MB.
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Haha. I'm not that paranoid, but thanks.

And good to know how you worked it out.
 
CW...please slow the hell down.

I'm getting the impression you have so many pies in the fire that you are neglecting basic QA practices! Stop doing that!
 
new_in_za2 said:
Oh, another thing to do stats on!

Roughly 140 accounts come with full phone numbers. Many more accounts come with partial phone numbers.
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Sum up all bandwidth usage next, give the deviation as well as the average across 4 days.
 
PostManPat said:
Sum up all bandwidth usage next, give the deviation as well as the average across 4 days.
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Can't be arsed with deviations, but the total bandwidth used by those affected by this leak is 36.1TB, or roughly 9TB per day. The average user affected by this leak uses 5.6GB of data per day, which I must say is less than I expected.

If we extrapolate this information to a guess of the total amount of Crystal Web clients, then Crystal Web are eating through roughly 29TB of data per day. This number might not be very accurate, though, as the mixture of account types contained in today's leak probably isn't representative of the mix of all Crystal Web accounts.

Keeping the above note about accuracy in mind, the average data throughput at Crystal Web is 3 gigabit per second. Note that this is the average and that their peak usage is likely a fair bit higher.

Edit: If we disregard all the accounts that have had 0 usage this month, the average becomes 6.5GB of data per day.
Edit2: Fixed the numbers a bit ;)
Edit3: More info.
Edit4: Even more info.
 
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Ho3n3r said:
I'm wondering how that even happens? I didn't have the opportunity to assign my own username - CW assigned it automatically for me.
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Looks like it takes first name + telephone number, if that username is taken it takes the first name and RNG's a few numbers to it.
 
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