{"id":162137,"date":"2011-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/a-large-scale-study-of-file-prevalance\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:15:07","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:15:07","slug":"a-large-scale-study-of-file-prevalance","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/a-large-scale-study-of-file-prevalance\/","title":{"rendered":"A Large-Scale Study of File Prevalance"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>We report on a large-scale telemetry project. The system gathered file reports from 20.7 million machines that ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor over a period of 13 months. The data gives a unique insight into file prevalence across a web-scale population. Among interesting findings is that over half of all files reported are seen on a single system and never seen again. There is considerable innovation, with new files being generated in the population at a rate of thousands per day. The client systems also exhibit extraordinary diversity with the least active and most active machines reporting very different file distributions. The data points to the extreme difficulty of building an exhaustive library of existing software. The longtail nature of the distribution shows that even 20 million systems is nowhere near enough to generate a comprehensive picture of the universe ofWindows software. The largest publicly available library, the National Software Registry Library, contains a mere 0.26% of the files reported by our clients.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We report on a large-scale telemetry project. The system gathered file reports from 20.7 million machines that ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor over a period of 13 months. The data gives a unique insight into file prevalence across a web-scale population. Among interesting findings is that over half of all files reported are seen on 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