I've found some time to investigate some drupal.org server logs and found that while everything is generally working, there are some strange things happening.

Every full hour our access stats go up by almost 150%. I looked at the IPs that produce a lot of hits over the day, but they weren't responsible for these spikes. The spike is produced by a lot of different Drupal sites that request our update data when the hour strikes.

And why? Because we tell them to! In line 239 of our INSTALL.txt we instruct people who install Drupal to request our update stats at precisely that time. A classical facepalm.

Thanks to Varnish and the generally robust drupal.org infrastructure, this isn't an actual problem, but with the continued growth of the number of Drupal sites it might become one.

I've filed a bug report and hope this will be fixed in Drupal 7.

And if you could just edit your crontab file and replace the 0 at the front by something else this would be appreciated.