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From 2,500 requests to 24: Rebuilding star history without the stargazers

Oct 14, 2026Taylor Cuilty, Sarita Iyer
From 2,500 requests to 24: Rebuilding star history without the stargazers
SummaryAI, from the source post

This post details the redesign of the star history endpoint to address performance and security issues. The original endpoint (`GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/stargazers`) was expensive due to fetching individual stargazer identities and a bug that counted all stars per request. The new endpoint provides daily star counts for up to 30 weeks in a single request, filtering stars by time before counting to reduce database processing. This change eliminates the need to expose user identities, mitigating spam and phishing risks.