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 addons.mozilla.org domain. I'll have to make due with code repositories.
These are our current options for submitting forms in Firefox 3:
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 recently (the new API was the culprit) we thought it would be a good idea to investigate upgrading.
I’ve been playing with CakePHP’s session code lately and ran across an interesting (read: nerdy) problem with cookies on AMO.
When you're using CakePHP!