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.