Addons – now with more cowbell!
10 August 2006If you’ve uses AddOns since Saturday afternoon, or just checked for extensions updates within any Mozilla app, you might have noticed that AddOns is much snappier. External monitoring indicates about a 4x speedup in page-load times.
Even more important this means we have much more capacity during release time to keep everything up and responsive. This is the CPU utilization of a system on the old cluster. Note on Thursday during the 1.5.0.6 release we hit near 100% CPU. The big drop on Saturday is when the switchover happened:
Here’s a server in the new cluster:
The speedup is a result of a new Caching and SSL/TCP accelerators sitting in front of the cluster.
Jeremy, Morgamic, and Matthew did the hard work to get the site up on the new cluster over the weekend. It leverages the sweat the Infra team has put in over the last 12 months to upgrade our core infrastructure. So there are lotsa folks to thank.
Why is this important? Extensions are one of the great things about Firefox. This makes it easier and more convenient for people to find and install extensions. It also means the browser experience is much improved whenever you check for extension updates. Like during a browser upgrade. It also means we can better keep pace with the rapidly growing user base and increased popularity of extensions.
The folks on the team are all too busy and bashful to brag about the kick-butt work they are doing – so I’m doing it for them 
.
Nice work!
3 Responses to “Addons – now with more cowbell!”
August 10th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
I’ve noticed the speed increase myself, especially on the developer control panel – it’s lightning fast now!
Please do be aware that add-ons doesn’t have a capital O, I dunno who started it, but it offends Shaver (oh, and consistency is always helpful.)
August 11th, 2006 at 7:58 am
I’ve definitely noticed a speedup, a huge one from back when you used to have your 256-Bit SSL certificate showing on the front page.
September 18th, 2006 at 9:53 am
The IT team has done a great job all around improving the speed and reliability of our app and database layers for web applications. Nice work, indeed. Also, Jeremy is really strong. Believe it!