Dev/Download Statistics

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Development Notes about Whonix Download Statistics

Info This page is archived.

Data Points[edit]

Last update: 2014|09|19

Outdated: No statistics for current versions of Whonix >= 10 available. [1]

Whonix Developer Meta Filesarchive.org (on githubarchive.org) may provide interesting data points.


  • Whonix News File downloads.
    • The internal/newsarchive.org folder shows downloads for deprecated Whonix News Files.
    • The internal/news_v3archive.org folder shows downloads for an intermediate, development only version of Whonix.
    • The internal/news_v4archive.org folder shows downloads of Whonix News Files by users of Whonix 8 and 9.
    • → Each time a user runs systemcheckarchive.org, a download counter will be increased.
    • → whonixcheck, unless manually disabled by the user, runs automatically. See systemcheckarchive.org wiki page to find out how often.


  • Whonix APT repository (optional; disabled by default; users are asked to enable or leave it disabled on first boot by setup-dist (on githubarchive.org)
    • internal/poolarchive.org folder.
    • internal/distsarchive.org folder.
      • stable folder = Whonix 8 stable repository
      • wheezy folder = Whonix 9 stable repository
      • testers folder (only used by users who choose Whonix testers-only APT repository]
      • developers folder (only used by users who choose Whonix developers-only APT repository]
      • -→ Each time some users that opted in for Whonix APT repository and executed "sudo apt update", a download counter will be increased.


Note, It is also planed to distribute Whonix News Files among multiple servers. Therefore these data points are outdated.

2015-04-19[edit]

Last data point. On 2015-04-19, Whonix news file was downloaded 12586 times. Divided by 2 (not counting gateway and workstation twice) that means, that approximately ~ 6000 users used Whonix on that day.

notes / sources:


2014|09|16[edit]

fortassearchive.org (whonix.org webmaster) wrote [2]:

We don't have anything like that, but I agree it would be interesting to get some statistics.

However, it is difficult to have statistics without being overly invasive. It is made doubly difficult because our downloads are served by mirrors provided by volunteers. I suppose we could have a simple counting script in front of those download links. Nothing as of yet, but I'll look into an easy / non-invasive way to get some basic statistics.

2014|09|19[edit]

At time of writing, there were 7 mirror IPs.
1 of Whonix download mirrors is creating statistics.
The live url is:
http://tap.rlogin.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=whonix
The snapshotted url at time of writing is:

2013|07[edit]

TBB's Influence on Download Statistics[edit]

Windows might have fewer downloaders than any statistic says, because TBB for Linux and MacOS claims, that it is Windows, which muddles the statistic.

What does "Anonymous Proxy" in sourceforge.net statistics mean?[edit]

Sourceforge support, ctsai-sf on freenode in #sourceforge said, they use GeoIP for country detection and browser agent for operating system and browser. GeoIP, according to its website [3], detects Anonymizer (they probably mean Tor and such), VPN and Open Proxies, so they everything into the same category of "Anonymous Proxy" - this is what sourceforge logs.

webcited on 2013|07|11[edit]

  • Before announcing migration to whonix.org.
  • Old design of download page (Please ignore the "Moved to https://www.whonix.orgarchive.org" part. That snapshot has been forgotten and made later. Nevertheless it gives an impression how the old download page looked like.)
  • Before using the new colored download table, which indicates, that http downloads without OpenPGP verification is the least secure method.
  • After blog post announcing experimental BitTorrent downloads.
  • Let's see, if after the end of this campaign, more users use OpenPGP verification
  • Or at least use BitTorrent - although we don't create download statistics for the .torrent files.
  • Or at least use magnet links - but we probably can not get statistics about them.
  • 965 Whonix-Gateway.ova downloads | 34 Whonix-Gateway.ova.sig downloads → 1 in ~29 used OpenPGP verification
  • 1173 Whonix-Workstation.ova downloads | 37 Whonix-Workstation.ova.sig downloads → 1 in ~32 used OpenPGP verification

webcited on 2013|07|31[edit]

  • After migration to whonix.org.
  • Using a colored download table, which indicates, that http downloads without OpenPGP verification is the least secure method, see download page].
  • 1015 Whonix-Gateway.ova downloads | 100 Whonix-Gateway.ova.sig downloads → 1 in ~10 used OpenPGP verification
  • 972 Whonix-Workstation.ova downloads | 85 Whonix-Workstation.ova.sig downloads → 1 in ~12 used OpenPGP verification

Discussion[edit]

Whonix Forum: download statsarchive.org

Footnotes / References[edit]

  1. Because files are downloaded from http://mirror.whonix.de, shared among various mirrors and we don't ask them to keep statistics nor go through the hassle of requesting/collecting these.
  2. https://forums.whonix.org/t/download-stats/497archive.org
  3. https://www.maxmind.com/en/solutions/minfraud-services/riskscorearchive.org

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