From Fedora Project Wiki

Revision as of 12:44, 24 June 2011 by Pfrields (talk | contribs) (Make note)

This page contains a variety of statistics about Fedora's usage. The Fedora Project believes that metrics are an important tool.

Who uses Fedora?

Lots of different people. Millions, in fact -- many millions! You can see some notable examples on the Overview page.

Fedora 15 (Lovelock)

Lovelock was released on 2011-05-24. (Pithiness coming soon.)

Yum Data

Current release connections

Connections to yum
Week Dates New Unique IPs Total Unique IPs Total compared to Laughlin
Week 1-4+ 2011-05-24 -- 2011-06-23 452,948 452,948 -- [1]


  1. The normal weekly count was unintentionally interrupted by a log host rebuild. However, the cumulative count is still correct and can be maintained normally for the remainder of the release cycle.

Total repository connections

Total connections to repositories
Fedora 7 Fedora 8 Fedora 9 Fedora 10 Fedora 11 Fedora 12 Fedora 13 Fedora 14 Fedora 15
4,302,524 6,983,004 3,979,568 4,609,505 4,753,579 5,030,459 3,920,456 3,363,198 452,948
TOTAL UNIQUE IPs: 31566948
This total is not a simple sum of the counts above. It is a list of unique IP addresses that have connected across all releases.

Currently, there is no reliable way to determine the total number of Linux users, or even count the total number of users of any Linux distribution which does not have a mandatory per user registration process.
Anyone who tells you otherwise may be misinformed, dishonest, or trying to sell you something.

The numbers above do not represent a total user count for Fedora. We are counting IP addresses because that is the only thing we can reliably measure. OEM shipping numbers, application popularity contests, and other "estimates" all have intrinsic error factors as well. Without a 1:1 sales figure or registration process, user counting is a difficult problem to solve. Our accuracy section below has a discussion of what's wrong with IP number counts, too.

When you hear someone estimate a count of users, the right questions to ask are:

Precisely how did you arrive at this number?
For Fedora the answers are located at this page.
Where is the data located, so someone can duplicate the process?
Although you do need appropriate access to our logging hosts to gather the data, our Infrastructure team does welcome people who want to participate in their work.

Accuracy of metrics

The numbers above, for yum, represent unique IP addresses that reach our update server, not simply downloads. We believe it is reasonable to equate a "new IP address checking in" with "a new installation of Fedora", with the following caveats:

  1. Users who have dynamic IP addresses will likely be counted multiple times, which inflates the number by some amount.
  2. Users who are behind NAT or corporate proxies will not be counted at all.

The anecdotal evidence that we receive from different groups, companies, and organizations suggests that group (2) is significantly larger than group (1). As such, we believe that the true numbers in the field are higher than the numbers on this page.

For a more thorough discussion and enlightening information about the measurement of Fedora's userbase, refer to this blog entry by Jef Spaleta.

Why is the Fedora 8 count so high?

We believe this is due to the high concentration of Fedora 8 images on Amazon EC2. We may see additional changes with Fedora 14 and later as that release is expected to be available on EC2 on release day.

Smolt Data

Smolt is Fedora's hardware profiling project. It is an opt-in database that tracks unique installations of Fedora, and various details about that install. People who install to runlevel 5 will be able to opt-in during firstboot, but people who install to runlevel 3 will have to install the smolt client via yum and manually register.

BitTorrent

The following table shows the number of downloads that have been made over BitTorrent. This table shows downloads only through trackers connected to the official torrent server.

Downloads from bittorrent (as of 2011-04-12)
Sulphur (F9) Cambridge (F10) Leonidas (F11)[1] Constantine (F12) Goddard (F13) Laughlin (F14)
443,932 523,776 364,808 315,349 158,570 157,251
NOTE: these numbers seem incomplete and need to be checked against torrent records. --pfrields 11:35, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
  1. The statistics for BitTorrent were interrupted on or about 2009-09-04 Fedora 11 because of a torrent server reset. Totals at that time are added to the current totals (F10: 306,696, F11: 169,832).

Direct Download

The following table shows the number of direct downloads of Fedora 41 media from unique IP addresses, as shown in the web proxy logs. The actual number of raw downloads tends to be much higher.

Direct downloads from the web

(includes a count of DVD, Live, CD disc 1, and netinst ISOs downloaded directly from the web)

Week Dates Downloads this week Total downloads Total compared to Laughlin
Week 1 2011-05-24 -- 2011-05-30 224,960 224,960 148%
Week 2 2011-05-31 -- 2011-06-06 105,883 330,843 133%
Week 3 2011-06-07 -- 2011-06-13 86,137 416,980 128%
Week 4 2011-06-14 -- 2011-06-20 85,315 502,295 127%

fedoraproject.org unique visitors

fedoraproject.org visitors
Period Unique IPs
January 2008 785,583
February 2008 782,043
March 2008 830,078
April 2008 723,776
May 2008 1,128,115
June 2008 825,912
July 2008 751,521
August 2008 773,209
September 2008 1,461,490
October 2008 1,351,477
November 2008 1,993,547
December 2008 1,873,217
January 2009 1,815,135
February 2009 1,697,108
March 2009 1,816,077
April 2009 1,749,571
May 2009 1,996,040
June 2009 2,305,280
July 2009 1,929,651
August 2009 1,964,544
September 2009 1,859,708
October 2009 1,996,649
November 2009 2,423,626 (all-time monthly high)
December 2009 1,969,482
January 2010 1,829,467
February 2010 1,628,215
March 2010 1,728,081
April 2010 1,585,905
May 2010 2,197,213
June 2010 1,853,870
July 2010 1,808,418
August 2010 1,589,666
September 2010 1,642,009
October 2010 1,903,774
November 2010 2,086,089
December 2010 1,645,695
January 2011 1,633,474
February 2011 1,493,936
March 2011 1,636,965

Edits to Fedora wiki

Fedora wiki edits
Period Total edits Edits from unique IPs
October 2007 921 426
November 2007 1,090 472
December 2007 807 378
January 2008 1,170 580
February 2008 1,244 645
March 2008 1,280 705
April 2008 1,283 755
May 2008 6,043 766
June 2008 6,561 731
July 2008 4,112 528
August 2008 2,226 423
September 2008 4,738 791
October 2008 3,848 617
November 2008 4,619 715
December 2008 4,627 751
January 2009 6,327 739
February 2009 7,444 764
March 2009 8,650 973
April 2009 5,294 844
May 2009 5,191 928
June 2009 5,337 858
July 2009 5,373 807
August 2009 4,864 702
September 2009 5,796 868
October 2009 5,407 782
November 2009 5,665 957
December 2009 4,058 653
January 2010 5,319 711
February 2010 12,384 761
March 2010 12,176 834
April 2010 13,874 1,001
May 2010 17,809 871
June 2010 13,879 672
July 2010 14,274 793
August 2010 13,657 791
September 2010 12,144 788
October 2010 12,400 888
November 2010 12,447 887
December 2010 7,458 627
January 2011 9,768 771
February 2011 11,920 950
March 2011 11,909 882

Contributors

In April 2008, the FAS (Fedora Account System) process was converted to a click-through process instead of a manual process of GPG signing and fax/email.

Translations

Details about the progress of the localisation can be found in our transifex instance.

Ambassadors

Information about the number of Fedora Ambassadors.

Translators

Information on the growth and numbers of Fedora Translators.

Maps

A variety of maps showing various statistics.

Charts

Some charts are available reflecting some of the information shown on this page. Up-to-date charts are available at the Fedora community portal.

Legacy Statistics

Older releases and years are on the Legacy statistics page.

Commands

Information on how these statistics are gathered is found here.