[Galene] Additional stats

[Galene] Additional stats

[Stefan Bethke]

Hi there,

long time lurker and occasional high-volume user (for chaos communication congress).

For this years' event, I would like to collect better stats about how many users are joining, and what their experience might be.

I see that there is /galene-api/v0/.stats, which provides headcount per room and general network stats. I have a small proxy that converts that to Prometheus format, so we can poll that and add it to the Prometheus/Grafana instance we're running for the event: https://github.com/stblassitude/galene-prom-exporter

I would be interested in making that endpoint an optional feature in Galéne, and I would additionally be interested in collecting ICE information.

Is there interest in such features, and would it be OK for me to use GenAI (Claude) for the implementation?


Regards,
stb

-- 
Stefan Bethke <stb@lassitu.de>   Fon +49 175 3288861

[Galene] Re: Additional stats

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Hi Stefan,

> I would be interested in making that endpoint an optional feature in Galéne, and I would additionally be interested in collecting ICE information.
> 
> Is there interest in such features, and would it be OK for me to use GenAI (Claude) for the implementation?

Extra statistics would be useful.  However two caveats:

1. Respect user privacy.  For example, the current endpoint does not
   expose IP addresses or user names.  This is important: people are using
   galene.org for intimate couple chat (I know because the group names are
   exposed), and there is at least one priest using Galene for online
   confession (he's using his own instance, thankfully).

2. Don't harm performance, at least when the admin is not monitoring.
   Galene is very carefully constructed to scale across many cores.  For
   example, we avoid locking whenever possible, and we try to avoid atomic
   variables that are shared between more than a few threads.

   Note in particular that the Go Prometheus library uses global atomics,
   which is a bad idea, since it causes cacheline bouncing.  (The right
   solution would be to have per-thread or per-CPU counters, together with
   periodic reconciliation.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd love you to experiment, but please
don't be discouraged if I don't accept your first attempt.

-- Juliusz

[Galene] Re: Additional stats

[Sebastien Binet]

hi there,

On Tue Oct 20, 2026 at 16:15 CET, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
>
>> I would be interested in making that endpoint an optional feature in Galéne, and I would additionally be interested in collecting ICE information.
>> 
>> Is there interest in such features, and would it be OK for me to use GenAI (Claude) for the implementation?
>
> Extra statistics would be useful. However two caveats:
>
> 1. Respect user privacy. For example, the current endpoint does not
> expose IP addresses or user names. This is important: people are using
> galene.org for intimate couple chat (I know because the group names are
> exposed), and there is at least one priest using Galene for online
> confession (he's using his own instance, thankfully).
>
> 2. Don't harm performance, at least when the admin is not monitoring.
> Galene is very carefully constructed to scale across many cores. For
> example, we avoid locking whenever possible, and we try to avoid atomic
> variables that are shared between more than a few threads.
>
> Note in particular that the Go Prometheus library uses global atomics,
> which is a bad idea, since it causes cacheline bouncing. (The right
> solution would be to have per-thread or per-CPU counters, together with
> periodic reconciliation.)
>
> I guess what I'm saying is that I'd love you to experiment, but please
> don't be discouraged if I don't accept your first attempt.

if genAI assisted code were to be included into Galène, could you first tag the last release of Galène that happens to be untainted (and advertise it) ?

that would help people who do not want such things to taint their work/homestation.

thanks in advance.

cheers,
-s

[Galene] GenAI in Galene [was:Additional stats]

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> if genAI assisted code were to be included into Galène, could you first
> tag the last release of Galène that happens to be untainted (and
> advertise it) ?

I do not intend to allow any GenAI code in the server.  This is not due to
any strong anti-AI stance, it's purely egoistical: I'm the person who will
end up having to maintain the slop.

(I'm a little less categorical about the UI parts, since I can understand
that people might not want to edit CSS by hand.  However, in my experience
GenAI-generated submissions tend to be overly verbose and redundant, and
the submitters disappear without trace when I ask them to fix the code.)

> that would help people who do not want such things to taint their
> work/homestation.

I'm probably somewhat less radical than you, but we're in general agreement.

-- Juliusz