Huge discrepancy between access.log, Google Analytics and Mapbox Statistics - django

Question

I have a website made in django and served using gunicorn in which a single Mapbox map is loaded on the home page using mapbox-gl.js. Users can then navigate the map and change styles at will. The map is initialized and loaded only once and only in the home page. The service is billed on a "map load" basis. The Mapbox pricing page says
A map load occurs whenever a Map object is initialized, offering users unlimited interactivity with your web map.
I would have expected to see a count, if not exactly identical, at least comparable between the data recorded by Mapbox billing, the accesses to the home page recorded by Google Analytics and the hits on the home page recorded on the server access.log.
Instead, the Mapbox count is in average about 25 times higher than Analytics and the access.log, which have similar numbers.
As an example, here are the numbers for yesterday:
Analytics: home page was loaded 890 times
access.log: 1261 requests for the home page
Mapbox: 23331 map loads
I am using URL restriction from the Mapbox control panel, but I guess the enforcement is not that strict, since they strongly suggest to also rotate the token periodically (which I am already doing on a daily basis). Since I started rotating the token I noticed a slight lowering on the map loads (from an average of 28k to an average of 24k) and no noticeable changes in the access log and analytics reports.
The map implementation in Javascript is the following:
mapboxgl.accessToken = MY_TOKEN
var map = new mapboxgl.Map({
container: 'map',
style: 'mapbox://styles/myaccount/mystyle',
center: [12.381384,42.059164],
zoom: 5,
});
As I mentioned, this script is contained in the home page and is executed only once when the page is loaded. Do you have any suggestion on how to keep the maploads low? I have no problem in paying for what I'm using, but I feel there's either something wrong in the way the map loads are calculated by Mapbox, something wrong in my implementation or some sort of bot actively stealing the token.

Answer 1

When you change styles, that triggers a reload on the map, which will be recorded as a separate map load.
What are you trying to achieve with changing styles? Is there a small set of styles that you want to toggle between? How do they differ? There may be a way to implement that does not require fully changing the style in the map.