1153925 - Investigate -1 tile ids

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Content Services Graveyard :: Tiles, defect)

Description

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

We were getting impressions for tile id -1 up until February 25. Not sure if this is expected or a still a bug in Firefox or elsewhere. I'm guessing because it completely stopped on the 25th with little draw down, there might have been a server change around that time?

Comment 1

[Matthew Ruttley [:mruttley]]

The full list of weird tile IDs: -691, -1, 999, 5000, 16903, 16910, 20000, 900000

Perhaps we could set up an alert that logs the IP/exact time of these impressions? I wouldn't be surprised if it were some script kiddie poking around with our API lol

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Those ids other than -1 only happen infrequently or only once. Having hundreds of thousands of impressions with -1 ids that follow the usual weekday vs weekend trends sounds more like a bug.

Comment 3

[Olivier Yiptong [:oyiptong]]

Since anyone can make a ping to our servers with random ID's, I would start to assume that they are people having a fun time. Perhaps we can try and see what the impact is vs the rest of the regular ID's.

In the past, we've had people send us ID's that caused an integer overflow in Python

Comment 4

[Olivier Yiptong [:oyiptong]]

It is interesting that it seems to rise and fall with regular traffic.

Can we get a graphical representation of the frequencies of the -1 tile ping vs regular pings? Perhaps on a log scale?

That should tell us if the -1 pings happen with any frequency, and it's been occurring for a long time

Comment 5

[Matthew Ruttley [:mruttley]]

oyiptong: what is super weird is that all the entries for Tile -1 are actually blank for impressions, clicks, blocks and pins. There's also no consistency in the locale, os, browser, version or country_code. There are about 70 million of these blank pings on the -1 tile.

I've dug into the data and it seems to have stopped in mid February so perhaps it was a bug that was fixed around then. 
Here's a spreadsheet with some data: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/spreadsheets/d/1OxjWDMlUguEugmOE8ULlZROwAkOwwnWliTM72unJ_qU/edit#gid=0

Comment 6

[Tim Spurway [:tspurway]]

Sorry for not piping in beforehand!  

tile_id = -1 was the way we were tracking 'fetch' events.  When we added the 'application_stats_daily' table in infernyx 0.1.32, we stopped using tile_id = -1 for this, and dedicated a table to the application events.

This query:

select date, action, sum(count)
from application_stats_daily
where action = 'fetch_served'
GROUP BY date, action
ORDER BY date, action;

might overlay well with some of the time periods where you are seeing -1 for tile_id in impression_stats_daily.