It’s Download Day. At 10:00 a.m. PDT, or noon, for us in Austin, Firefox 3.0 was released to the public in what the Mozilla foundation has dubbed “download day.” In fact, they’re attempting to set a Guinness World Record for “most downloads in a 24 hour period.”
So, it was a bit of a concern to us because with all those people downloading Web browsers, there would be sure to be traffic spikes on our network. But the “Download Day” promotion is such a huge success that Mozilla is having trouble keeping their own server up.
At 10:16 a.m. PDT, I can see a “The server at www.spreadfirefox.com is taking too long to respond” error. Mozilla.org is also unable to resolve.
At 10:30 a.m. PDT, it’s still not connecting, and I decide to stop hitting refresh and go and eat lunch. Mmm. Roast Beef.
At 11:30 a.m. PDT, Spreadfirefox.com is still not resolving, but Mozilla.org does. That doesn’t last, however, as I go to download Firefox, I get a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error. I bring up a copy of “Waiting for Godot” in another browser window.
It is 12:00 noon on the Pacific. Spreadfirefox.com is still not resolving.
12:30 p.m. PDT. Still not working. I clean off my work desk, something I’ve been putting off for a wh—ew, is that mayonnaise? (I hope that’s mayonnaise.)
1:00 p.m. PDT. No Firefox, but My desk is now clean. (My closet is now dangerous.) Time to catch up on my RSS feeds to find out if there are any interesting leads that I can investigate. Hmm. Wine 1.0 is out, but that really doesn’t have a lot to do with network performance. Reddit seems have problems with Firefox too. But somebody has to be getting the browser – there’s over 8000 downloads a minute according to the counting tracker. Wait. Some users report the counts running backward… what, are people uploading it back?
1:45 p.m. PDT. Aha! Finally. The page resolves and I begin my download… and it redirects me to Firefox 2.0.0.14. Great.
1:55 p.m. PDT. I download Opera 9.5.
2:00 p.m. PDT. Mozilla’s page finally shows a link to Firefox 3.0 – but still shows the logo for Firefox 2. The 7.1 MB download starts at around 50kBytes/s – which is pretty lame for the usual 700kBytes/s I can get when I download from work.
2:15 p.m. I install Firefox 3.0 and launch it. It’s nice. It’s certainly more responsive and uses less memory. However, my Tab Mix Plus extension isn’t compatible, and furthermore, there’s no option to undo closed tabs. All in all, a disappointment – if it were a restaurant, it would be infamous for slow service and bad food.
Leaving aside the whole “Undo Closed Tabs” issue, you would think that an organization actively trying to beat the world record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period might, you know, be prepared enough to make sure the servers don’t go down?
Additionally; Mozilla has been promoting “Download Day” for some time now, so it makes sense for IT departments to be prepared for the onslaught of downloads coming into the network from users upgrading their PCs to the latest version of the browser – and keep track of the impact that traffic has on the user experience for more mission-critical apps.
No comments yet.