[Ntop] How are statistics about individual hosts stored?

[Jack Bates]

Hi and thank you for ntop. It is very helpful for managing our limited 
internet access, here at a rural village in Rwanda

Can you please tell me a bit about how ntop stores statistics about 
individual hosts?

I would like to make something similar to the "Network Traffic" reports 
in ntop, for statistics about our caching proxy. At its most basic this 
would be a table of hosts and the amount of data recently used by each host

I can execute some code every time our caching proxy handles a request, 
with the host and the size of the transaction. I want to store this 
information in an efficient way, so it doesn't grow indefinitely, and so 
I can efficiently calculate totals for each host

I know one of the features of RRDtool is that it stores only the most 
recent values and its database doesn't grow indefinitely. I looked at 
the ntop source for an example of using RRDtool to store statistics 
about individual hosts, but it seems ntop doesn't use RRDtool for this?

So can you please tell me a bit about how ntop does store statistics 
about individual hosts? or point me at a resource where I can read a bit 
about it? Maybe you can please tell me a bit about how ntop uses 
RRDtool? or offer any other advice on how to make a report similar to 
the "Network Traffic" reports in ntop, but for our caching proxy traffic?

Thanks again!