Ecosystem lifecycle
How work opens, closes, ships and branches across all of GitHub — derived from issue, pull-request, release and branch events rather than from commit volume.
Recent volumes measure the archive, not GitHub. Every panel here is built from non-push events, and GH Archive's capture of those fell to 1–3% of historic rates between March and August 2026 — the same collapse Data health documents. Counts for 2023–2025 are sound; 2026 counts are not a measure of GitHub activity. The ratios below hold up better, because a collapse in capture pulls both sides down together.
Issue backlog: opened against closed
12,819,299 opened and 4,720,296 closed over 1 year (13 months) — 0.37 closed for every one opened. A ratio below 1 means the open backlog grows.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-08-01 to 2026-08-01. Opened: 12,819,299 total, peak 2,248,436 in a day. Closed: 4,720,296 total, peak 628,188 in a day.
- Opened
- Closed
Pull request throughput
30,601,553 opened, 10,679,476 closed. Merged and rejected cannot be separated — GH Archive does not populate the pull request state on these events, so a close is a close either way.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-08-01 to 2026-08-01. Opened: 30,601,553 total, peak 4,456,056 in a day. Closed: 10,679,476 total, peak 3,902,060 in a day.
- Opened
- Closed
Release cadence
Published releases per month over 1 year. Tags are cut far more often than releases are published — see branch and tag creation below.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-08-01 to 2026-08-01. Releases: 4,905,778 total, peak 634,742 in a day.
- Releases
Branch churn
106,109,376 branches created and 35,823,713 deleted over 1 year. Branch creation is the one CreateEvent stream the archive still carries at full volume, which makes it the most reliable series on this page.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-08-01 to 2026-08-01. Created: 106,109,376 total, peak 10,561,034 in a day. Deleted: 35,823,713 total, peak 3,670,572 in a day.
- Created
- Deleted
Repository and tag creation stopped being recorded
GH Archive emitted 4.11M repository creations in September 2025, 1.04M in October, and none at all from November onward — while branch creation, above, continued unaffected. A clean stop on two ref_type values, four months before the gradual non-push decline began and unrelated to it. Nothing here is recoverable from the archive.
Line chart, 3 months from 2025-08-01 to 2025-10-01. Repositories: 9,307,692 total, peak 4,151,775 in a day. Tags: 2,013,772 total, peak 919,353 in a day.
- Repositories
- Tags
What the ecosystem is labelling
Most-used issue and pull-request labels in 2026-08-01. Repositories matters more than uses: one busy project can invent a label and out-post everyone, so a label spread across many repositories is the one that reflects shared practice.
| Label | Uses | Repositories | Uses per repo |
|---|---|---|---|
| bug | 20.4K | 8K | 2.6 |
| enhancement | 17.7K | 8.1K | 2.2 |
| dependencies | 10.7K | 7.9K | 1.4 |
| javascript | 4.6K | 3.5K | 1.3 |
| documentation | 4.1K | 2K | 2.0 |
| good first issue | 3.7K | 837 | 4.5 |
| ready-for-agent | 3.7K | 1.7K | 2.2 |
| help wanted | 3.3K | 615 | 5.3 |
| type:feature | 2.8K | 450 | 6.1 |
| security | 2.6K | 1.1K | 2.4 |
| status | 2.2K | 467 | 4.6 |
| P2 | 2.1K | 372 | 5.7 |
| feature | 2.1K | 798 | 2.6 |
| Stellar Wave | 2K | 532 | 3.8 |
| GSSoC-26 | 2K | 2 | 1003.0 |
| gssoc:approved | 2K | 31 | 63.3 |
| backend | 1.9K | 630 | 3.0 |
| needs-review | 1.8K | 85 | 21.4 |
| needs-triage | 1.8K | 472 | 3.8 |
| P1 | 1.8K | 392 | 4.6 |
| size/XS | 1.7K | 208 | 8.0 |
| frontend | 1.6K | 603 | 2.7 |
| testing | 1.6K | 469 | 3.3 |
| github_actions | 1.5K | 1.2K | 1.2 |