Socorro, Mozilla, and How to be Open

about:mozilla Laura Thomson laura@mozilla.com February 10th, 2011

I usually work from the general to the specific, but today’sgoing to be a bit different.

I usually work from the general to the specific, but today’sgoing to be a bit different.There’s an agenda, but it’s your agenda, so feel free tointerrupt with questions at any time.

I usually work from the general to the specific, but today’sgoing to be a bit different.There’s an agenda, but it’s your agenda, so feel free tointerrupt with questions at any time.I’m going to give you a tour of my work, and of Mozilla, andwhat it means to be open by default.

Webtools at Mozilla Webtools is: Socorro, the crash reporting system Perf-o-matic, performance graphing AUS, the automatic update service Elmo, tools for our localization community ...and whatever else is needed

We exist to help shipthe most stablefastestsafestmost widely availableFirefox.

Let’s take a look at Socorro.

What is it?

“Socorro has a lot of moving parts”...“I prefer to think of them as dancing parts”

A different type of scaling:Typical webapp: scale to millions of users withoutdegradation of response timeSocorro: less than a hundred users, terabytes of data.

Basic law of scale still applies:The bigger you get, the more spectacularly you fail

Some numbers At peak we receive 3000 crashes per minute 3 million per day Median crash size 100k -> 150k 30TB stored in HBase and growing every day

What can we do? Does betaN have more (null signature) crashes than other betas? Analyze differences between Flash versions x and y crashes Detect duplicate crashes Detect explosive crashes Email victims of a malware-related crash

As with any large system, regardless of the dimension ofscaling, problem solving involves two things:system thinkingempirical evidence

Stability Recent challenge, solved by: basic stability work (research, restarts) architectural improvements better build and release processes better insight into systems move to a new datacenter

Data center move Worse than moving house: Four months of planning, ten people, a hundred new machines, forty smoke test boxes Audits and system improvements Opportunity to iron out many problems and weaknesses

It’s all open Get the code: http://code.google.com/p/socorro Read/file/fix bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ Call in for the weekly meetings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Breakpad/Status_Meetings Join us in IRC: irc.mozilla.org #breakpad

Open by Default This is the Mozilla Way: Open by default Open in all but a handful of cases The good, the bad, and the ugly: all of it happens in public discourse

Starting open is easier Open from the beginning is easier than retroactively open. Why? licensing dependencies shame culture

Becoming open is possible How open do we want to be? What licensing are we going to use? How will we encourage, accept, and mediate contributions from non-employees, or non-official project members? How will projects be governed?

Open Works For Mozilla Open means honest Open means participation: stuff gets done by volunteers Open leads to autonomy and trust Open leads to pushing decision making to the edges Open leads to a certain degree of anarchy at Mozilla... “we are fiercely unconventional.”

Firefox answers to no-one but you.

Questions? Ask me (almost) anything Ask me in email: laura@mozilla.com

Socorro, Mozilla, and How to be Open

by lauraxthomson on Feb 14, 2011

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Socorro, Mozilla, and How to be Open — Presentation Transcript