Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2007-11-03

Lies, damned lies, and a side order of acronym soup

By my calculations, EMF has scored over 2 million download requests since 2006-01-01. That's a huge number, but it's also an inaccurate number because our stats gen was broken for a while so there's a big hole in the Update Manager download stats. As such it's probably much higher, given the traffic we've had since the stats tool was fixed.

Looking at the overall numbers for all the tracked Modeling projects, we've had 5 million download requests since 2006-01-01 for EMF + M2T + MDT ... and that's just the Update Manager requests!

It's also fun to see who's downloading our bits. As expected, the US tops the chart, with Canada a respectable 8th. To get a sense for where EMF is used consider where the following projects are developed:

  1. US: GMF, M2T-JET, WTP, TPTP, VE, ...
  2. China: MDT-EODM, TPTP
  3. France: EMFT, MDDi, M2M, GMT
  4. Canada: EMF & EMF-QTV, MDT (UML2 & OCL), M2T-JET, GEF, GMF, WTP, TPTP, ...
  5. The Netherlands: EMFT-Teneo
  6. Czech Republic: GMF, MDT-UML2 Tools

To paraphrase Ed and the Zulu people, "umuntu ngumuntu MDD!" ;-)

4 comments:

Jacek Pospychala said...

It's nice to see how popular Eclipse became last few months in Poland. (according to this).

But general shape of the stats make me wonder on one thing. I tried single month periods since beginning of the year, and in every month the first country has the twice number of downloads of the second on the list. But countries change radically, eg. Jan,March-Apr is China domination, Brasil and Macedonia somewhere and Jul-Oct Poland.

Like there was some EclipseBus, traveling around the world and generating huge amount of hits.
Or maybe it's somehow related to moon phases?? ;)

nickb said...

This is why I tend to shy away from reporting stats. The tools are far from perfect, the data is incomplete, and even the real numbers only mean "download requests" not "installed seats" or "active users."

Why China domination? Perhaps they downloaded more old modeling project releases during that time, or they were developing against the latest EMF 2.3 milestones and thus had to keep getting new versions. Unfortunately, the per-country aggregation doesn't show the individual files requested.

An explanation here for why Poland took off like a rocket could be this: once EMF 2.3.0 was released at the end of June, Polish downloaders started to try to get EMF via update sites. But due to a shortage of fast European mirrors, a lot of those "download requests" had to be logged multiple times, so these numbers may be a little inflated. Or, it could be that Poland is very interested in GMF: each request for a GMF install means a request for EMF, Query, Transaction, Validation, OCL & UML2, for a total of at least 6 download requests.

And next year when the EPP Modeling Bundles come out, we'll have to change the metrics again because we'll need to track yet another set of filenames processed through download.eclipse.org.

Plus we'll hopefully be able to track download requests via the Ganymede Discovery site, but again, that will only provide "download request" numbers, which are by definition not the same as "downloads" or "installs."

Eric said...

I am surprised not to see Germany on the download stats. Should it really be true that they are behind Colombia? I think that must be another bug...

nickb said...

Agreed. I would expect Germany and Switzerland would appear somewhere, but I can't find them even when looking at the daily stats... see bug 208686.