Category Archives: load balancing

Hello China, part III.

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 […]

Hello China.

Over the past year we’ve talked about our market share in China (since last April anyways). Li Gong joined Mozilla and in June we had an office. In August I was in China with Justin to setup office infrastructure (phones, vpn) and shop for data center space.
In December I was back […]

China, Amsterdam, San Jose and global load balancing

Mozilla’s current GSLB (global server load balancing[1]) solution (Citrix Netscalers) is a mix of active proximity probes and static map assignments.
The algorithm first checks to see if there’s a match in the static maps and then falls back to proximity metrics. If that’s missing, it’ll round-robin through all the GSLB sites (effectively three - […]

Where in the world is AMO? (Part V: It’s live, again!)

With little fanfare, we flipped the switch last night and started serving addons.mozilla.org out of both Amsterdam and San Jose. Took two tries and a hardware swap, but we got it!
This whole saga’s been detailed elsewhere (and here and here and here).
The Good (and the graphs)
Last time, I rolled back when Europe started waking […]

Where in the world is AMO? (Part IV: Take 2)

Nearly a month after the first attempt to get AMO (addons.mozilla.org) served out of Amterdam as well as San Jose failed, we’re ready to try again!
I finally got the replacement hardware (Netscaler 9000s) in Amsterdam up this morning. During our Tuesday night maintenance window I’ll be switching DNS.
For those late to this saga, take […]

How to build a better (SSL proxy) mouse trap (with lighttpd)?

We run our web farm behind a pair of Citrix Netscalers in both San Jose and Amsterdam. What really hits these boxes hard is the SSL offloaded traffic and in certain instances has caused the Netscalers to fall over on themselves.
Right now our setup looks like:

(Pardon the shapes, it’s what I have to work […]