General

Plugin Downloads Statistics Discrepancies in January 2018: post-mortem

As some plugin developers and end-users noticed, there were some discrepancies in both total downloads counts and the detailed plugin downloads statistics available to plugin developers – there was an unusual spike of downloads at the beginning of January 2018.

We started investigating these reports on the morning of 8th January 2018 (CET timezone), and it was fully resolved by the end of the day.

Our investigation showed that our new statistics processing scripts didn’t survive the New Year due to a minor bug, and hadn’t been providing correct numbers from the 2nd of January 2018 onwards (adding the previous stats on top of the current day).

We quickly fixed the scripts and recalculated all the statistics for affected days. The issue should not happen again in the future.

In addition to the fix, we also prepared a “backup solution” as part of the Plugin Repository application. The backup solution allows us to “delay” statistics from a specific date so that it doesn’t break total download counters (which is the most significant impact, as this affects plugin recommendations). We will keep this backup solution in place so that it can be used instantly in case of similar issues.

Thank you for all your reports, and we are sorry for the inconvenience caused.

If you have any suggestions or issues, feel free to send them to us here in comments, post to @JBPlatform Twitter, or drop us an email at plugins-admin@jetbrains.com.