1483082 - Use addons.thunderbird.net instead of a redirect in service preferences.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Comment 1

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

Attachment: Use direct links instead of redirects for blocklist and extensions prefs

Comment 2

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

Comment on attachment 9003959 [details] [diff] [review]
Use direct links instead of redirects for blocklist and extensions prefs

The reasoning for this is that URLs with a lot of parameters are difficult for Cloudflare to cache, so the blocklists.settings URL and the extensions.getAddons URLs that include a bunch of GUIDs tend to hit the web servers directly.

We haven't enabled automatic updating to TB60, and these redirects already make up 45% of our web traffic. Covering this traffic is a silly reason to pay for more web servers, so it's best we just go back to direct links.

Is approval-comm-esr60 still the right flag for TB60.1?

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Comment on attachment 9003959 [details] [diff] [review]
Use direct links instead of redirects for blocklist and extensions prefs

I don't quite understand it, but r+ anyway.

So without this change, "... extensions.getAddons URLs that include a bunch of GUIDs tend to hit the web servers directly". And with the change? Won't direct links have the same effect? And we have to pay for the web servers just the same? Or do you mean we need to pay for the Cloudflare caching which doesn't work in this case, so no need to pay?

TB 60 b 11 was built yesterday, but I can get this into TB 60.1.

Comment 4

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+2) from comment #3)
> Comment on attachment 9003959 [details] [diff] [review]
> 
> So without this change, "... extensions.getAddons URLs that include a bunch
> of GUIDs tend to hit the web servers directly". And with the change? Won't
> direct links have the same effect? And we have to pay for the web servers
> just the same? Or do you mean we need to pay for the Cloudflare caching
> which doesn't work in this case, so no need to pay?.

With the redirect, we hit live.thunderbird.net/blocklists.settings/a/zillion/parameters and then it's redirected to mozilla.com in the case of the blocklist, or the addon servers on AWS for the various extensions.getAddons prefs. That redirect is rarely being cached in Cloudflare because of the zillion parameter problem, so live.thunderbird.net has to serve it.

For the services.addons.thunderbird.net URLs, we do have to handle the traffic anyway after the redirect, but this doubles the uncached traffic. And services.addons.thunderbird.net is on AWS and designed to handle a lot of direct traffic from the start. The servers that handle live.thunderbird.net (www. and start. too) are pretty minimal and rely on Cloudflare caching(which is free) to serve >95% of their traffic. All this uncached traffic has been pushing them very close to overloaded on peak euro times(monday mornings). And that's without the TB60.1 auto update, which is another big increase, since these redirects aren't in TB52.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/0d7d34130b9e
Use direct links instead of redirects for blocklist and extensions prefs. rs=jorgk CLOSED TREE DONTBUILD

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Thanks for the explanation. Looks like I understand 43% of it ;-)

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

TB 60.1 ESR:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr60/rev/fff4f6c879202bbc217d72252511fe2336ec813c

Comment 8

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

TB 60 beta 11:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/6ee14490f62a233c4e237c1a9d02d4e6f57efb50