It’s Aliiiiive!

Mike Morgan

26 responses

The new addons.mozilla.org (AMO) is up and running through its first peak load time without major issues. We will continue to monitor site performance today to verify that our performance adjustments indeed solved our load issues.

What did we do?

  • Moved public files back to releases.mozilla.org, so those mirrors can do what they are good at — delivering files.
  • Fixed image paths so they do not vary with locale. Since images are not localized, they do not have to have varying URLs. By limiting images to a unique URL, it improves cache rates.
  • Adjusted caching rules. We had configured the load balancer to not cache all content when a user has logged in. Unfortunately that meant not caching images and other high-traffic services. We adjusted caching rules to force all images and service URLs to be cached regardless of whether or not a user is logged in.

Below are the load and traffic graphs as of 1040AM PST.

mrapp01 load

The load is much more linear, and at a lower level with our adjustments in place.

mrapp01 traffic

We have an increase in traffic, but this is expected as we have many more images and locales to support. The traffic spikes from last Friday were much higher than this, however, due to releases.mozilla.org traffic and lack of caching.

Overall I can’t say how happy I am to see some better results. Thanks to everyone who worked over the weekend with us to help troubleshoot. The battle isn’t over yet — we’re still looking for ways to tweak performance — but we can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Categories: AMO

26 responses

  1. klint wrote on :

    And the light at the end of the tunnel is definitely not a train coming to us 😉
    Thanks for all the good work you have done !

  2. Johnny K wrote on :

    I don’t know where I’m supposed to submit feature requests, so I’m just gonna do it here (hope you don’t mind).

    A while ago, someone pointed out that sorting the add-ons by name by default will encourage people to name their extensions “AAA [extension name]”. He was right. Check out these pages:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1/cat:13
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/browse/type:1/cat:4/sort:name

    And that’s just within the past couple weeks. Is there any way you could sort them by rating by default instead?

  3. Seth Wagoner wrote on :

    Johnny: Don’t think all of those have been added in last couple weeks. As far as I know they’ve been building up forever but the old system wasn’t sorted alphabetically by default. The new system was designed to serve a smaller number of (higher quality) addons so it wasn’t such a big deal, but now they’ve carried over all the old ones it makes sense to change the default sort method to something other than alphabetical.

  4. Josh M wrote on :

    Is there any way that you can search for any addons that would work with a specific version? E.g. all addons that work with Firefox 3?

  5. Jacques wrote on :

    Impressive! Good work! All I wished for came true!

    Keep up the good work.

  6. funTomas wrote on :

    Great news! So images were the culprit? Hope, most extensions will utilize SVG soon.

  7. frank wrote on :

    @Johnny

    I agree that sorting alphabetically is bad for everyone. It’s completely useless for users and will certainly create new trends in extension naming. Sorting by rating can quite easily be abused as well.

    I believe that from the average user’s perspective, sorting by popularity would be the best option. However, from the developer’s point of view, this won’t give new extensions much exposure at all.

    Perhaps extensions should be sorted by some kind of “activity index” that is computed from the number of recent downloads, ratings, and the time of last update? Just a thought.

  8. Milos wrote on :

    Alphabetical sort is disaster.

    Also, when will download counter in developer’s control panel become functional? I don’t see that numbers moves one way or another?

  9. Jon G wrote on :

    Seconding Milos – I’d prefer default sort to be user ranking or popularity.

    And speaking of popularity – when will the download numbers start being updated again?

    Congrats on the launch!

  10. Homzik wrote on :

    It seems that sorting by update doesn’t work fine… it’s all mixed up, old addons with new ones…

  11. Chuck Baker wrote on :

    I think the *default* sorting should be completely random. This would give all public add-ons equal status. Of course there should be options to change the sort to alphabetical, ratings, author. or category.

  12. Jayakumar k wrote on :

    I am not able to see any comments which were available previously. It was very helpful to find information about the extension. Please let me know how to access that.

  13. Amsterdammer wrote on :

    Congratulations! 🙂
    But wil you check again please Geman site: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/browse/type:1
    The translation of “Privacy and Security” must be “Datenschutz und Sicherheit” ?

  14. xeen wrote on :

    Numba 5 is ALIVE!… oh wait… it’s remora ^^

  15. morgamic wrote on :

    Nah, it fits — that’s probably about how many times we’ve tried to release it.

  16. Wil Clouser wrote on :

    Since a lot of people are talking about it here, I’ll mention that I opened a bug about the default sort order on browse pages: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=375764

    Feel free to add comments/suggestions there, or CC yourself to stay up to date on the progress.

  17. Jeff T wrote on :

    Are there issues with uploading addons? I have not been able to upload to update my theme.

  18. Lazar wrote on :

    It seems my message did not appear for more than a day. I’ll just post it again (expanded ;-).

    Download counter is definitely not working which further handicaps extensions in the sandbox getting closer to the editorial panel. I’m not sure if review option is working either (didn’t try it yet).

    I think that sandbox should definitely be accessible to non-registered/logged users, even if it made difficult and with MANY warning/danger signs. As situation is now, there is absolutely no feedback for developers thru the sandbox system, be it in counter numbers, reviews, or non-registered users feedbacks. Makes me think: ‘Why did I post it there at the first place?”

    It would help A LOT if source code (all of it) was accessible thru website. I know that may be a technical issue (reading of jar archives), but maybe submission of ‘unpacked’ package should be mandatory. If this was the case, I would browse much more thru parts of codes that were interesting to me (as I really don’t have time to analyze a 100k+ extension), and would probably give reviews on parts of these codes. This would also help a lot in detecting ‘suspicious/potentially dangerous’ code lines.

    I know that development process is full of unpredictable obstacles and that AMO team is exhausted by recent intense events, however, some of the things I mentioned I know require minimal changes, and make huge difference.

    That’s about all I have to say. Take care.

  19. Lazar wrote on :

    This is great! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/files/browse/14461

    It seems that jar files can be also browsed! Part of what I said before is already done (or it existed before but I didn’t know it).

  20. Michael Buckley wrote on :

    You know the one thing I miss is seeing the download count, I always used it as a factor in deicing if I wanted to install and add-on or not.

    Can we please have this back?

  21. pqrabcd wrote on :

    I WANT THE RATINGS & NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS TO BE BACK. AS SAID IN THE PREVIOUS POST, THEY HELP IN DECIDING WHETHER TO DOWNLOAD THE EXTENSION OR NOT. IT ALSO HELPS THE DEVELOPERS TO KEEP TRACK OF HOW THEIR EXTENSION IS DOING. ATLEAST HAVE IT IN THE DEVELOPER CONTROL PANEL. THERE IS DOWNLOAD COUNT BUT IT IS NOT UPDATED.

  22. CP wrote on :

    How about brining back the SeaMonkey/Firefox/Thinderbird icons so we can tell how versatile the extension is, without having to switch between them all just to see if its compatible.

  23. DeadEnd wrote on :

    Why are we redirected to the list of all discussions when we want to start a new discussion on a specific add-on? And when I click on a comment I made on the CookieSafe page I get an error message. How can I edit it? Or answer it?

    I’m back to using reviews as a way of asking about bugs and suggesting improvements, which isn’t what a review should be about and is highly impractical when you’re trying to talk with the author. You’re stuck with editing your review again and again.

  24. DeadEnd wrote on :

    Addendum:

    Figured out how to start a new discussion on a specific add-on by appending the add-on ID to the post URL but there used to be a link saying ‘Start a discussion’ on each add-on page, didn’t there? That’s what missing.

    Why I got an error message: the link to the comment was ‘https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/discussions/comments.php?DiscussionID=33’ and now only ‘https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/discussions/comments.php?DiscussionID=33’ works.

  25. DeadEnd wrote on :

    Addendum. Again!

    Wait. It’s only the French version of the site which sucks. Everything works well in the en-US version. Editing the subject of a comment seems to change its ID though (but that may be in the FR version only). And being able to delete a comment would be nice.

    I’ll stop spamming you now.

  26. Andy wrote on :

    Is there a way to flag comments (reviews) for deletion?
    Thanks