piwheels stats 2020Q1

Posted 1 April 2020 by Ben Nuttall

In the period of January – March 2020, 3,317,443 packages were downloaded from piwheels, bringing the total to 18,062,971. This has saved nearly 60 years in the period, and 232 years in total! This was in no small part to The mysterious case of the unexplained downloads spike which turned out to be an upgrade pushed to octoprint users.

Each month had around 1.1 million downloads:

which saved around between 17 and 22 years per month:

March had the highest number of downloads ever with 1,276,799. The highest day was 5 March with a whopping 60,324. This was the second day of the spike caused by octoprint. The next two weeks dropped steadily each day, but left regular daily downloads around 40k, which is 5-10k greater than usual.

The top 10 downloads were:

1. pycparser (147,532)
2. Flask-Login (98,382) *
3. numpy (83,633)
4. zope.component (81,875)
5. PyYAML (75,123)
6. cffi (62,605)
7. opencv-python (52,953)
8. Markdown (52,203) *
9. sentry-sdk (50,927) *
10. semantic-version (50,236) *

* Note that Flask-Login, Markdown, sentry-sdk and semantic version are all dependencies of the octoprint project upgrade which caused the massive spike.

In March alone, these four packages topped the bill, leaving pycparser trailing:

1. Flask-Login (94,457)
2. Markdown (49,957)
3. semantic-version (49,314)
4. sentry-sdk (49,269)
5. pycparser (32,167)

It’s still unexplained why Flask-Login got nearly double the downloads of the other two packages.

Raspbian still dominates usage with almost 95%:

armv7l (Pi 2/3/4 platform) is still a majority architecture with 89% usage, with armv6l (Pi 1/Zero) taking just 8%. The combined Arm architecture takes over 97% of all usage:

Python version usage changes more over time. Since Raspbian Buster was released, Python 3.7 usage quickly overtook Python 3.5:

Interestingly, there appears to have been a spike in usage of Python 2.7. However this is purely down to the octoprint upgrades. The four packages affected are universal Python wheels, so they work with 2 and 3.

This was the busiest period for piwheels so far. The month of March was by a long way the biggest month. We saw a spike which broke all previous records by far. It’s been really interesting to see just one kind of Raspberry Pi use (octoprint) cause such a significant growth spurt.