‘Socorro’ Archives
Socorro Project Update
There has been a lot going on for the Mozilla crash reporting system. Here are some quick links for project activity: Closed bugs Active bugs Code check-in RSS Socorro documentation Upcoming changes: Socorro site redesign - Neil and Austin are working with Sam and Chris to work through crash analysis to understand how the system is used to track down the cause of certain crashes. Structure, navigation and layout will be redone to best accommodate ... Read More »
Crash Stats updated with Flot
As we headed closer and closer to Día de Muertos, do you ask "where can I mingle with the dead (processes)"? Why at Mozilla's crash reporter tool, you'll find Firefoxen, SeaMonkeys, and Thunderbirds who have crossed over and yet still linger... Last week we updated the plotting library we use for graphs to use Flot and we fixed a handful of Socorro webapp bugs. Flot is a good choice where we have simple graphs to display. Below are two graphs from the crash report listing page: An new crashes by OS bar chart for production builds, ... Read More »
Socorro’s File System Storage
As the scope and depth of the Socorro/Breakpad project has evolved in the last nine months, the most nonvolatile requirement of the project has been a file system as the initial server side storage for submitted crash dumps. The file system gets used as an ad hoc hierarchical database, but it isn't optimized for the type of lookups that we need to do. Unfortunately, the original implementation was without indexing by name leaving us using a search (sort of like using find over NFS with 9 million entries). We patched and then patched the patches as the magnitude ... Read More »
Socorro Database Migration
In our last post we described one of our Q4 goals as: work with PostgreSQL to update and optimize our hardware and software configurations Aravind has gone ahead and migrated the Socorro database to its new hardware and we've upgraded PostgreSQL to 8.3 in order to take advantage of performance optimizations that went into the most recent release. We've also updated the configuration so xlogs and logs are written to a different data store than the main database. Unfortunately this required a full migration over the weekend, which required some downtime. This morning we are running a full vacuum which ... Read More »
The Crashing Edge
This will be the first of a weekly blog about the crash reporting system -- much like the other *edge blogs out there. In short, we've rewritten most of the system to accomodate throughput that is more than 10 times the projected traffic. It is not because Firefox 3 is crashing more -- we are seeing increased traffic because: Client-side throttling has not been effective Overall number of users has increased Mac Intel builds now submit crashes properly What have we been up to? First, two bug lists: Bugs closed between the last blog post and now Socorro 0.6 -- our next milestone, targeted for early ... Read More »
Socorro Processor Updates
Last Friday we pushed some important updates to Socorro: Bug 426940 - Reduce or eliminate delay in collector to monitor hand-off Bug 426940 - Fix processor handling of error conditions Bug 428300 - status page too slow This means: When you submit a crash report you won't have to wait longer than 30-60 seconds to view your report The processor now has better handling of minidump_stackwalk fatal errors There is an improved server status page where you can view stats on the current queue Thanks to Lars and Aravind for getting this out the door. The next couple of weeks will be spent ... Read More »
Crash Analysis: now in Open Source flavor
History can tell you that companies don't disclose crashes in their software. They keep a pretty close eye on what crashes and bugs are disclosed. Mozilla doesn't. Rather than being the exception, openness is the rule, and that is one of the coolest things about being a part of this. My job, my everday tasks, they aren't secret, and they are not to drive profits. They are to drive the web. In that spirit, our crash reporting system (Socorro) is available to whoever wants to view it. Aside ... Read More »
Socorro Updates
Socorro has had a few improvements over the last week. bsmedberg, ispiked and luser worked hard to bring you: Graphs to show crash population over time Crash reports by operating system Crash reports by build and operating system There are plenty of fun graphs that show trends over time. For example, see this graph that shows a common crash in gfxFont::Draw: Up next, we'll be working on finishing up milestone 2 items and work towards milestone 3. For more about the project and what we're working on: See the project home page... Read More »
