An empirical study of the dynamics of GitHub repository and its impact on distributed software development

Abstract

GitHub is a distributed code repository and project hosting web site. It is becoming one of the most popular web-based services to host both opensource projects and closed-source projects. In this paper, we review different kinds of version control systems and study the dynamics of GitHub, i.e., the ability and scalability of GitHub to process different requests and provide different services to different GitHub projects and GitHub users. Our study shows that GitHub could handle hundreds of thousands of requests a day for all the projects and thousands of requests for one project. This capability of GitHub makes it suitable for supporting distributed software development.