Gem survey

Hi, I would like to get some statistics about gem installations so that I can better understand how we should make performance improvements to RubyGems.

QUICK START

Do this once:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey.rb | ruby

Then in each project do this:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey.rb | bundle exec ruby

Or run it all at once:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey_all.rb | bundle exec ruby

Not so quick start

This script gathers some information about the gems that you have installed as well as your Ruby version, RubyGems version and operating system information and uploads them to a Google form anonymously, but with a mostly unique id. I've outlined exactly what information is collected and why below.

I would like to collect system wide information, as well as per-project information.

Running the script

You can run via curl or wget as below, or just download the file and run it directly. It only depends on code in stdlib, so you shouldn't need to install anything.

System wide statistics

For system wide statistics, run the script like this:

wget:

$ wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey.rb | ruby 

curl:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey.rb | ruby

Per project stats

For per-project statistics, run the script like this:

wget:

$ wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey.rb | bundle exec ruby 

curl:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenderlove/gem_survey/master/survey.rb | bundle exec ruby

What information is collected?

Here is a table of what information is collected and why:

Name	Description / Reason
ID	A mostly unique id that consists of a SHA256 of your hostname, ip address, time zone, and home directory. This field is to help understand how many projects each person has, and to help weed out duplicate data.
BUNDLER	A SHA256 of the project directory if the project uses bundler. This field is to help differentiate system wide statistics from per project bundler statistics. It also helps to remove duplicate records of pre project stats
GEM_COUNT	The number of gems available for activation.
ENGINE	The Ruby implementation that you're using
RUBY_VERSION	The version of Ruby that you're using
ENGINE_VERSION	The version of the engine that you're using
HOST_OS	Your operating system
FILE_COUNT_MIN	The fewest files in a gem specification
FILE_COUNT_MAX	The most files in a gem specification
FILE_COUNT_MEDIAN	The median files per gem specification
FILE_COUNT_MEAN	The mean files per gem specification
FILE_COUNT_STDDEV	The standard deviation for the files per gem specification

This data will be posted to a Google form. I don't have access to access logs, so I shouldn't be able to tell who posted what data. I'll only have the data listed above.

What will this data be used for?

I would like to use this data to determine how best to speed up RubyGems. My goal is to add different types of caches to Ruby Gems, but the type of cache depends on the usage. If a particular optimization only helps people who have thousands of gems, but most people only have hundreds, then maybe the optimization isn't worth while.

I may be able to backport these optimizations to older versions of RubyGems (by using a gem). But that would depend on the usage.

Finally, I think the things we can do to speed up RubyGems could also be used to speed up Bundler by providing the right APIs.