To check this I ran two weeks’ worth of web server logs through awstats with the geoip plugin.  From this, I’ve learned the following:

1. I was wrong.  In this post I said that “connectivity to mainland China can often be congested and can induce a lot of latency.”  Round-trip times between San Jose and China are only 30ms more than they are to Amsterdam (195ms vs. 166ms).  I don’t see any of the congestion that I saw from either of the two hotels I stayed or at that I see from the China office.
2. We’re serving a large portion of the Asia-Pacific region out of our Beijing, China colo. Far more than I think any of us had thought and we’re doing it remarkably well (even Gomez says so)!  I’ve even received emails from folks in that region wondering why www.mozilla.com is so much quicker/closer than any of Mozilla’s other web properties.

Looking at those log hits through awstats and pushing those results into Numbers gets me this:

(The 5% USA appears to be a combination of errors in the allocation database (IP is registered to a US entity but traceroute shows otherwise) and a few US-based ISPs that, for whatever reason, keep hitting China.  Other is a lot of smaller hits to Asia-Pacific countries and some IP addresses that didn’t automatically resolve to a country.)

Since the color seperation might be hard to read, the raw numbers are here.

I’m generally very happy with these results. In the next few weeks we should be adding addons.mozilla.org and spinning up our geo-dns setup to start pushing releases.mozilla.org out of China too.  Stay tuned.

Even to the untrained eye it’s pretty obvious when I made the change!

As I mentioned before, if you inadvertantly find yourself hitting the China data center, please file a bug so we can investigate.

Otherwise, I’m hoping there are a lot of happy Chinese users!

In December I was back in China to install and deploy that data center and promised that “in the next several weeks we’ll be pulling up Mozilla websites in China.”

This past week[1] we did two important things for our Chinese users -

1. Integrated www.mozillaonline.com into our svn repo and pushed out its content to all static web clusters in Amsterdam, San Jose and China (it used to be hosted off a fileserver in the China office!). This site’s currently served out of San Jose and China.
2. Setup a mirror of releases.mozilla.org in China. This is currently known as releases.mozillaonline.com (until we get a more geo-aware DNS solution in place for releases.mozilla.org you’ll have to use that address).

This week we’ll make another important change.

During Tuesday night’s maintenance window (02/12 @ 8pm Pacific) I’ll be adding the China datacenter into www.mozilla.com’s global load balancing (which I talked about here). As I mentioned in my last post, we’ll also be watching the server logs to make sure GSLB isn’t sending users outside of China to China when they’d be better served out of San Jose or Amsterdam. If you find yourself in this category, please let me know (email or file a bug).

All of this effort has been to get content as close as possible to users. From my two trips to China I know getting to Mozilla content is often painfully slow, reminiscent of my pre-ISDN days. Updating Minefield nightlies every morning was often a couple hour process!

[1] I started this post with the intention of posting it January 28th but got side tracked when the host that holds all web content (before pushing out to the web servers) and all of the releases.mozilla.org mirror content lost it’s storage shelf, halting all of these plans. Because of this storm it took longer than usual to get resolved.