mrz’s noise

We’ve been pushing production traffic out of our China colo for about a month now.  One of my concerns was how well this site would serve our global user base and how well the Netscaler’s dynamic GSLB would work.  I didn’t want users being sent to this data center who should really goto San Jose or Amsterdam.

To check this I ran two weeks’ worth of web server logs through awstats with the geoip plugin.  From this, I’ve learned the following:

1. I was wrong.  In this post I said that “connectivity to mainland China can often be congested and can induce a lot of latency.”  Round-trip times between San Jose and China are only 30ms more than they are to Amsterdam (195ms vs. 166ms).  I don’t see any of the congestion that I saw from either of the two hotels I stayed or at that I see from the China office.
2. We’re serving a large portion of the Asia-Pacific region out of our Beijing, China colo. Far more than I think any of us had thought and we’re doing it remarkably well (even Gomez says so)!  I’ve even received emails from folks in that region wondering why www.mozilla.com is so much quicker/closer than any of Mozilla’s other web properties.

Looking at those log hits through awstats and pushing those results into Numbers gets me this:

(The 5% USA appears to be a combination of errors in the allocation database (IP is registered to a US entity but traceroute shows otherwise) and a few US-based ISPs that, for whatever reason, keep hitting China.  Other is a lot of smaller hits to Asia-Pacific countries and some IP addresses that didn’t automatically resolve to a country.)

Since the color seperation might be hard to read, the raw numbers are here.

I’m generally very happy with these results. In the next few weeks we should be adding addons.mozilla.org and spinning up our geo-dns setup to start pushing releases.mozilla.org out of China too.  Stay tuned.