AMO Deployment This Week

Last week we had challenges in deploying the new addons.mozilla.org. We’ve done our best to keep everyone up to date through this blog. We know we are all anxious to get things going, so we wanted to make sure everyone is kept up to date with what’s going on.

Scalability of our new site has been a unique challenge for us. We are trying to tackle localization for a large number of locales for both static and dynamic data, which is something not many sites do — and especially not many sites with our volume of traffic.

We have faced unique challenges in trying to reproduce the staggering load that addons.mozilla.org gets. Load testing could only get so close to the environment we have in production. So at some point, we have to announce an outage window and give things a shot with real traffic.

During our maintenance windows this week, we have gathered important data on what we may be able to do to mimic that load, and we should be able to better test changes before we put them in production. Once we get through the launch we’ll do a full postmortem to help us improve for next time.

Our latest setback has been a database bottleneck for retrieving localized add-on data from our translations table. We are working through this and testing has shown improvements so far.

That said, there are still more adjustments we can make to improve site performance. We will continue to work on tuning our site, and our final deployment will definitely not happen until we are sure the site will be reliable for our users.

The delays, while frustrating (especially to us!), were made in the best interests of our community. We want them to have a snappy and reliable site. We want a snappy and reliable site so we can get our own add-ons, too. 🙂

If anybody has questions or suggestions, feel free to contact any of us — probably easiest to find us in IRC in #amo.

Thanks to everyone who has helped us and supported our efforts — we’re almost home so hang in there.

Categories: AMO

9 responses

  1. UnNene wrote on :

    Good luck, guys. Hope you come through.

  2. Ryan Wagner wrote on :

    Having troubleshooted load problems myself I really feel your frustration. It is just one of those things that keeps you up at night wondering why it won’t just work. Hope you get it figured it because I’m sure you’ll be a lot happier, too. 😀

  3. ffextensionguru wrote on :

    Since I haven’t seen this addressed yet (if it has sorry), what is going to happen once this is deployed and someone tries to follow a link to an add-on under the old AMO? I have noticed the new URLs are including the local for that particular add-on. Will they automatically forward, stay active for a fixed period of time or just produce “Page Not Found” error?

  4. Cameron wrote on :

    @ffextensionguru yes we’ve been working on redirecting the old urls to the new ones – we’ve got most of the important ones covered 🙂

  5. Wladimir Palant wrote on :

    Do you actually plan to fix bug 370595 before releasing? I would set blocking‑remora‑launch flag on it if it were possible – localization of add-on descriptions is pretty much broken.

  6. Marty wrote on :

    What about the queue of addons? Are they being reviewed in the meantime, or does it have to wait until the new site launches?

  7. Jonas Skovmand wrote on :

    Since there are a lot of IRC networks, both private and public, which one is your channel on?
    #amo doesn’t say that much 😉

  8. Tonino wrote on :

    Agh,
    the wait is killing me!
    I know you are doing it for a good reason and I applaud you for it, but the fact that it was supposed go online last week makes me so nervous.

    Well, at least I know it’s gonna be worth the wait like Firefox 2.0.0.2.
    I was I could say the same of some other companies… (Yes THAT one)

    Do you have any prevision about the date it’s going live?

    Thanks for your work!

  9. Cameron wrote on :

    @Jonas:
    irc.mozilla.org 😉