(This post has been updated with the new go-live date.) Our new update server software (codenamed Balrog) has been in development for quite awhile now. In October of 2013 we moved Nightly and Aurora to it. This past September we moved Beta users to it. Finally, we're ready to switch the vast majority of our users over. We'll be doing that on the morning of Tuesday, January 20th. Just like when we switched nightly/aurora/beta over, this change should be invisible, but please file a bug or swing by #releng if you notice any issues with updates. Stick around if you're interested in some of the load testing we did.

---

Shortly after switching all of the Beta users to Balrog we did a load test to see if Balrog could handle the amount of traffic that the release channel would throw at it. With just 10% of the release traffic being handled, it blew up: We were pulling more than 150MBit/sec per web head from the database server, and saturating the CPUs completely. This caused very slow requests, to the point where many were just timing out. While we were hoping that it would just work, this wasn't a complete surprise given that we hadn't implemented any form of caching yet. After implementing a simple LRU cache on Balrog's largest objects, we did another load test. Here's what the load looked like on one web head: Once caching was enabled the load was practically non-existent. As we ramped up release channel traffic the load grew, but in a more or less linear (and very gradual) fashion. At around 11:35 on this graph we were serving all of the release channel traffic, and each web head was using a meager 50% of its CPU: I'm not sure what to call that other than winning.