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npm / download-counts

Background jobs and a minimal service for collecting and delivering download counts
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unusually high download count for a new module that is published every 15 minutes #9

Closed dylang closed 9 years ago

dylang commented 10 years ago

screen shot 2014-09-22 at 2 04 05 pm

The package bigben was published a few days ago and has been getting a steady increase of daily downloads increasing by about 18,000 daily, with 112,790 downloads yesterday.

https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/range/last-month/bigben

I'm sure 389,314 downloads the first week is possible, but this particular package doesn't do anything. The author is using a script to change the version and re-publish it every 15 minutes.

Could there be a bug that results in downloads to artificially increase when a package is published?

Discussion with the author: https://github.com/OndrejP/NpmjsBigBen/issues/1

(I know download-counts is only used to query the stats and not collect them, but I wasn't sure where else to put this ticket. I'm happy to re-create it wherever it belongs.)

seldo commented 10 years ago

We are in touch with the author of this package about this behaviour. It seems rapid-fire publishing interacts badly with some mirroring solutions (notably npm-fullfat-registry, which we no longer run but other people do) which is causing a ton of repeat downloads. Over the weekend, 1% of downloads were bigben.

We'll hopefully get bigben to stop but we're probably going to need to do something about the mirrors, as this is happening on a smaller scale with any package with a lot of versions.

dylang commented 10 years ago

Oh, fascinating, thanks for sharing the reason! This also makes me feel better that it won't cause problems with our internal npm-skimdb-registry.