Crates.io download counter - unexpected changes

help
1

Hi everyone,

I have a few crates published on crates.io which get mostly used by myself and thus have only a few daily downloads (0-200 depending on crate and day). These are mostly due to CI/CD workflows that test the packages.

I have noticed a change in the counter after the 30th of October along a few things:

  1. Lower overall downloads despite no change in usage
  2. No downloads of versions other than the most recent one.

You can verify these results for yourself by visiting:

https://crates.io/crates/approx-derive
https://crates.io/crates/cellular_raza
https://crates.io/crates/crate2bib
https://crates.io/crates/indexing_fmt
https://crates.io/crates/spatial-decomposition
https://crates.io/crates/vtk-rs

The image shows a selection of the above list.

downloads
downloads941×2335 407 KB

2

Seems to be monthly

3

Hmm ... the peak for the time crate could probably explained by the new release. For me, I am not so sure to be honest.

4

Last month it was more than just time.

Here it was mentioned for hashbrown.

5

I mean ... I get that spikes happen due to automation tools, possibly some ML companies who update their codebases to train their models on. But how does the inverse happen if usage does not change significantly. Was there a change in reporting of downloads on the side of crates.io?

2 Likes
6

Download counting was changed: cdn_logs: Filter downloads by user agent by Turbo87 · Pull Request #12210 · rust-lang/crates.io · GitHub

5 Likes
7

Oh sorry. I thaught you also saw a spike. Sorry for not reading carefully.

8

That explains it. Thanks!