piaware VS graphs1090

The Github version available at https://github.com/flightaware/piaware doesn't appear to use any Java at all, and a search of the repository doesn't suggest there's any use of log4j.

The piaware feeder software itself can run a limited number of commands as root if you allow it to - see piaware.sudoers (or your locally installed copy) for details.

If you haven't already: https://github.com/wiedehopf/graphs1090

You can install ADSBExchange and the stats package. You can also install graphs1090 ( https://github.com/wiedehopf/graphs1090 ).

It's worth installing wiedehopf's graph tools which makes it easy to monitor your receiver's performance over time.

There is one effect that might also contribute: How the number of tracked aircraft is calculated: https://github.com/wiedehopf/graphs1090/blob/master/dump1090.py#L307 So ... you can have messages in the message count that belong to an aircraft that's not counted as being tracked. Really you can argue the opposite as well if you were to use 60 seconds as a cutoff (data collection happens every 60 seconds). Then you have aircraft that send one message in a minute and count as "tracked" while well are you really tracking them and should they count? 30 seconds is at least in my opinion a good value that doesn't inflate the number of aircraft tracked as much.