BitMover founder Larry McVoy [interview] offered some statistics regarding Linux development and the use of BitKeeper. For example, regarding Linus' 2.5 development tree he says:

"There are about 8600 changesets in the tree. There have been 76998 deltas made to the tree since Feb 05 2002. That's an average of 37 changesets and 333 deltas per *day* seven days a week. If you assume a 5 day work week then the numbers are 52 csets/day and 466 deltas/day.

"Those changerate numbers are pretty zippy. You guys are rockin'."

Zippy indeed! The 2.5 development kernel has seen some amazing improvements. Here's one user that's greatly anticipating 2.6... (With the feature freeze occuring October 31st, I don't expect to see 2.6.0 until some time next year.)

From: Larry McVoy
 To: linux-kernel mailing list
 Subject: boring BK stats
 Date: 	Sun, 22 Sep 2002 16:56:04 -0700
 
 I should be working on getting the bk-3.0 release done but I'm sick of
 fixing BK-on-windows bugs...
 
 Linus' kernel tree has 13333 revision controlled files in it.  Without
 repository compression, it eats up 280M in an ext2 fs.  With repository
 compression, that drops to 129M.  After checking out all the files, the
 size of the revision history and the checked out files is 317MB when
 the revision history is compressed.  That means the tree without the
 history is 188MB, we get the revision history in less space than the
 checked out tree.  That's pretty cool, by the way, I know of no other
 SCM system which can say that.
 
 Checking out the tree takes 16 seconds.  Doing an integrity check takes 10
 seconds if the repository is uncompressed, 15 seconds if it is compressed.
 That's on 1.3Ghz Athlon w/ PC133 memory running at the slower CAS rate,
 but lots of it, around 900MB.
 
 An integrity check checksums the entire revision history and does a
 checkout into /dev/null to make sure that both the overall and most
 recent delta checksums are valid.
 
 There are about 8600 changesets in the tree.  There have been 76998
 deltas made to the tree since Feb 05 2002.  That's an average of 37
 changesets and 333 deltas per *day* seven days a week.  If you assume
 a 5 day work week then the numbers are 52 csets/day and 466 deltas/day.
 
 Those changerate numbers are pretty zippy.  You guys are rockin'.
 
 As for syncs with bkbits, I dunno, my guess is we're pushing 300,000 pulls
 or so.  We're nowhere near to saturating the T1 line so BK compression
 stuff is working well.