npm module download stats - accurate?

[Ed Sykes]

Hi everyone,

I uploaded my first package a few days ago. Looking at the stats on the package https://www.npmjs.com/package/lib1self-server it claims a number of downloads. I'm pretty certain these stats are way too high. What's going on here, are there proxies / scrapers / cdns downloading - adding to the stats?

Ed

[Aria Stewart]

> On Jan 28, 2015, at 1:36 AM, Ed Sykes <ed.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I uploaded my first package a few days ago. Looking at the stats on the package https://www.npmjs.com/package/lib1self-server it claims a number of downloads. I'm pretty certain these stats are way too high. What's going on here, are there proxies / scrapers / cdns downloading - adding to the stats?

Definitely! There are mirrors and scrapers for sure.

Aria

[Justin Maat]

I had this exact same question yesterday and looked into it a little bit.  

Here' s a sort-of explanation 

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/92574016600/numeric-precision-matters-how-npm-download-counts

Also, 

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Node-Packaged-Modules-npm-have-so-many-downloads-per-month

I think one factor might be (at least in my case) is that the dependency may be downloaded on every build on my CI server.  Which would explain most of the downloads :)  When each commit kicks off a build and download, that number gets up fast.  Add to that any bots, etc.. and the number can move up quite a bit.