Hello China.

2

Over the past year we’ve talked about our market share in China (since last April anyways). Li Gong joined Mozilla and in June we had an office. In August I was in China with Justin to setup office infrastructure (phones, vpn) and shop for data center space.

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.

Tags: ,

Categories: load balancing, Mozilla

2 responses

  1. Yusuf Goolamabbas wrote on :

    Hi, Just wanted to check whether you are considering Hong Kong as part of China. We are ‘One Country, Two Systems’ but from a network perspective I’d rather get my updates from San Jose than from behind the Great Firewall

    BTW, Your comment fields are not intutive. There are only graphic labels next to the text boxes and it’s not apparent at first glance what goes where

  2. mrz wrote on :

    That’s a good question – I’m using the geo ip database from maxmind.com. If you goto http://www.maxmind.com/app/locate_ip and enter your source IP address, maxmind returns HK.

    When I built the static map I only used IP addresses in CN.

    GSLB is dynamic, however, and will calculate which datacenter is closest. I’m not sure what that means for HK. You could check – try to traceroute to http://www.mozillaonline.com (or try to ping that address). If you get 59.151.50.0/24 you’re in China, 63.245.209.0/24 is in San Jose (63.245.213.0/24 is in Amsterdam but mozillaonline.com isn’t being hosted out of there).