When are the FreeBSD trees the busiest?

Following on from:

• When do commits happen in the FreeBSD docs tree?
• When do commits happen in the FreeBSD src tree?
• When do commits happen in the FreeBSD ports tree?

I asked for the busiest times. This is what Claude said.

When is the FreeBSD project busiest? I counted every commit to the ports, src and doc trees over the past ten years by the time of day it was committed. All times are UTC.

The short answer

All three trees are busiest in the late afternoon and early evening UTC, and quietest in the early hours UTC. The single busiest hour is 18:00–18:59 UTC for ports and doc, and 17:00–17:59 UTC for src. For reference, 18:00 UTC is 14:00 US Eastern daylight time and 20:00 Central European summer time, when the working days of Europe and the Americas overlap.

Tree	Commits	Busiest hour (share of commits)	Busiest 3-hour window	Quietest hour
ports	367,474	18:00–18:59 (6.5%)	17:00–19:59 (18.7%)	01:00–01:59 (1.7%)
src	82,491	17:00–17:59 (6.8%)	16:00–18:59 (20.2%)	06:00–06:59 (2.2%)
doc	12,376	18:00–18:59 (7.7%)	17:00–19:59 (21.6%)	03:00–03:59 (1.7%)

Method

• Window: 2016-09-26 12:07 UTC to 2026-09-26 12:07 UTC.
• Source: the main branch of each repository (freebsd-ports, freebsd-src, freebsd-doc). For src and doc, first-parent history is used so that each commit is counted when it landed on main; branches and vendor-import history are not included. All three trees moved from Subversion to Git in December 2020 (src, doc) or April 2021 (ports); earlier history comes from the conversion.
• Timestamps: committer date, converted to UTC. For the Subversion era this is when the commit reached the server; Git does not record push time, so for the Git era committer date is the closest available measure.
• Each commit is counted once, in the UTC hour it was committed. Percentages are the share of that tree’s commits.

Commits by hour of day

Hour (UTC)	ports	%	src	%	doc	%
00:00–00:59	12,639	3.4%	2,725	3.3%	460	3.7%
01:00–01:59	6,203	1.7%	2,297	2.8%	254	2.1%
02:00–02:59	6,464	1.8%	2,229	2.7%	256	2.1%
03:00–03:59	7,452	2.0%	2,043	2.5%	206	1.7%
04:00–04:59	7,980	2.2%	2,120	2.6%	207	1.7%
05:00–05:59	11,219	3.1%	1,821	2.2%	206	1.7%
06:00–06:59	11,435	3.1%	1,792	2.2%	323	2.6%
07:00–07:59	13,789	3.8%	2,067	2.5%	321	2.6%
08:00–08:59	14,602	4.0%	2,202	2.7%	462	3.7%
09:00–09:59	17,679	4.8%	2,435	3.0%	552	4.5%
10:00–10:59	15,066	4.1%	2,556	3.1%	580	4.7%
11:00–11:59	15,612	4.2%	2,548	3.1%	604	4.9%
12:00–12:59	15,378	4.2%	2,634	3.2%	511	4.1%
13:00–13:59	17,960	4.9%	3,387	4.1%	536	4.3%
14:00–14:59	20,689	5.6%	4,526	5.5%	655	5.3%
15:00–15:59	20,868	5.7%	5,198	6.3%	777	6.3%
16:00–16:59	19,928	5.4%	5,405	6.6%	801	6.5%
17:00–17:59	22,180	6.0%	5,645	6.8%	890	7.2%
18:00–18:59	24,007	6.5%	5,580	6.8%	948	7.7%
19:00–19:59	22,695	6.2%	5,262	6.4%	833	6.7%
20:00–20:59	20,340	5.5%	5,130	6.2%	762	6.2%
21:00–21:59	18,115	4.9%	5,139	6.2%	500	4.0%
22:00–22:59	12,275	3.3%	4,261	5.2%	382	3.1%
23:00–23:59	12,899	3.5%	3,489	4.2%	350	2.8%

The shapes differ in the details. ports ramps up earliest, from about 05:00 UTC, and stays busy until about 21:00 UTC. src stays fairly flat through the European morning and then climbs sharply from 13:00 UTC, holding its peak from about 15:00 to 21:00 UTC, which matches the working day in the Americas. doc is the most concentrated: 21.6% of its commits land between 17:00 and 19:59 UTC, and its quietest hours (03:00–05:59 UTC) see less than a quarter of its peak-hour activity.

The busiest 15 minutes

Breaking the day into 15-minute slots shows the three busiest slots in each tree, with the number of commits in that slot over ten years.

Tree	Busiest	Second	Third
ports	15:45–15:59 (7,065)	18:45–18:59 (6,494)	19:15–19:29 (6,399)
src	18:15–18:29 (1,566)	18:00–18:14 (1,443)	17:45–17:59 (1,429)
doc	18:15–18:29 (251)	18:30–18:44 (242)	18:45–18:59 (241)

The ports tree’s busiest slot, 15:45–15:59 UTC, stands out from the hour around it, and most of the commits in it come from one very prolific committer, Po-Chuan Hsieh (sunpoet@). In src and doc the busiest slots sit in the middle of the evening peak around 18:00 UTC.

Weekdays and weekends

Day (UTC)	ports	src	doc
Monday	15.6%	15.7%	14.7%
Tuesday	14.6%	16.8%	14.6%
Wednesday	13.7%	16.5%	13.9%
Thursday	12.9%	15.9%	14.9%
Friday	13.0%	15.9%	14.9%
Saturday	14.3%	10.2%	13.1%
Sunday	15.9%	9.0%	13.9%

The trees behave very differently by day of the week. src is clearly a weekday tree: Saturday and Sunday each carry about 9–10% of commits, compared with about 16–17% on each weekday. ports leans the other way: Sunday is its busiest day and Monday its second, Saturday is busier than Wednesday through Friday, and Thursday is the quietest. doc is spread fairly evenly across the week, between about 13% and 15% a day.

Tree	Busiest hour, Mon–Fri	Busiest hour, Sat–Sun
ports	18:00–18:59	14:00–14:59
src	17:00–17:59	17:00–17:59
doc	18:00–18:59	18:00–18:59

On weekends the ports tree’s peak moves earlier, to 14:00–14:59 UTC; src and doc keep the same peak hour.

Year by year

The busiest hour of each full calendar year:

Year	ports	src	doc
2017	15:00	20:00	17:00
2018	19:00	18:00	18:00
2019	17:00	18:00	18:00
2020	18:00	21:00	18:00
2021	19:00	18:00	18:00
2022	18:00	17:00	10:00
2023	17:00	17:00	09:00
2024	14:00	18:00	00:00
2025	15:00	15:00	16:00

For ports and src the peak has stayed between 14:00 and 21:00 UTC every year. doc has so few commits per hour that its yearly peak moves around more; in 2022–2024 it fell in the European morning or around midnight UTC.