Archive for June, 2007
Download Counts Halted
The download controller was modified on Thursday to prepare for the release of the 1.5.0.12 -> 2.0.0.4 major update. During release cycles, AMO takes abnormally high load which sometimes causes interruptions in service. To avoid this situation we agreed to cache public download hits from the AMO install buttons. This does two things: Relieve application load by allowing the hardware load balancer to cache file requests -- which are ultimately redirects to releases.mozilla.org Relieve the database by not having constant inserts on the download table -- which causes extra load because of indexes that were put on the table to make ... Read More »
Sharing Ideas Without Having to Think
Steve Krug would agree that thinking is a bad thing. Not that thinking in general is bad. I've found that it is actually a good thing. Thinking can be bad when it is a barrier between a user and what they want. People don't want to spend more time thinking about how to do something -- they just want to do it. It is why simpler sites win. Simpler means less thinking and a better experience for the average user. The same ideology can and should be applied to all other realms. ... Read More »
Kubla is dead! Long live Kubla!
The last time Kubla came up we were still evaluating options and the code was an old version of CakePHP all flushed out with scaffolding. Most of the time between then and now has been spent on other projects (I'm looking at you AMO) but we've made enough progress to justify another update. Out of the CMS's evaluated, we thought two showed great promise for our set of requirements. The first option that I got excited about was Wyona's Yulup. This is actually an add-on for Firefox that can talk directly ... Read More »
Triple Play (that’s what they say in baseball, right?)
Wednesday was the first Firefox release since AMO 3.0 (Remora) launched in late March. It's expected that traffic to Mozilla websites will increase following a release, but it's usually in the range of 1.5 times normal traffic. Thursday, traffic to our San Jose facility tripled normal traffic, breaking 600 Mb/s. (The historical graph below is averaged down and doesn't show that high, but Justin will be giving more details from IT's point of view soon.) When Firefox is updated, a separate update check for each add-on installed is performed, causing AMO to get quite a bit of ... Read More »
