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{ Tag Archives } AMO

Add-on Statistics Status

Add-on statistics have been intermittent for a couple months and are just recently getting the attention they need. Our current process is to count download statistics once per day and update ping statistics once per week (update pings are a sampling of the complete set). The reliability of the script generating these statistics has been [...]

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Adding context to AMO .po files

Adding context to the .po files on AMO has been one of our challenges since we started localizing the site. The solution we decided to use, place holder strings, is non-standard and can be difficult to use for someone that is used to how gettext normally works. The localization tool we’ve decided to use for [...]

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New AMO release cycle

I’ve been the lead of the AMO 3.4.x development release cycles which have been going on for about 8 weeks. During that time we’ve been a little more structured with our release schedule. The general plan has been a code freeze every other Monday at midnight and a push to production the following Thursday. This [...]

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addons.mozilla.org and Localization at the Firefox Summit

We’re planning several sessions at the upcoming Firefox summit including one specifically about AMO and L10n in which we hope to connect with localizers and start looking at some of the pain points of localizing AMO. With that in mind I’ve been collecting topic ideas and I’d like to hear any others you have. On [...]

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Memcached best practices and internals

Yesterday, igvita.com published a short article summarizing memcached internals and best practices. It was originally a talk by Brian Aker and Alan Kasindorf and their slides are included. It’s a good read and digs into memcached’s memory management and expiration logic. (Thanks for the heads up, chenb). I noticed their first best practice for memcached, [...]

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Caching is easy; Expiration is hard

Still on a high from our success with memcached in AMO version 2, we decided to go a fairly common route and cache query results in version 3. This performs admirably particularly with our rediculously long and slow queries. Over time, though, the popularity of the site and the load on the servers climb, and [...]

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AMO Scalability: Then and Now

Struggling with scalability on AMO is nothing new but the tools we use to solve the problems have changed over time. Here is a bit of information on the performance evolution AMO has gone through. I wanted to link to the wayback machine for all our old versions, but I get “Redirect Errors” for the [...]

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CakePHP makes upgrading easy

Laura attended CakeFest a couple months ago and got to meet some core Cake developers in person. In doing so she let slip that AMO was running on a pretty old version (1.1.12 – Released in December of 2006). Apparently 1.1.15 had some major performance boosts and since we melted the cluster a few times [...]

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How my cookies became a one way street

I’ve been playing with CakePHP’s session code lately and ran across an interesting (read: nerdy) problem with cookies on AMO. First, some background: The uniqueness of a cookie in the browser is determined by all the attributes when it’s set (not just it’s name). That means I can have multiple cookies named AMOv3 as long [...]

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Frameworks that start sessions for every visitor make me sad

I might have played the devil’s advocate when Lars was hating on frameworks at the barcamp last weekend, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see his point. The latest in a series of frustrations with frameworks kept me up until 3am last night. What better way to cap it off than complaining on the internet? [...]

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