Web Browsers/Web Servers: The Web is Still Shrinking, Mozilla News
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February 2023 Web Server Survey [Ed: The Web is shrinking. Many sites go offline.]
In the February 2023 survey we received responses from 1,127,630,293 sites across 270,727,775 unique domains, and 12,142,793 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4,638,508 sites, 240,148 domains and 13,907 computers.
OpenResty had the largest percentage growth in sites this month: it is now used by 95,176,082 sites, an increase of 2,884,258 (+3.13%) since last month. This brings its share of sites to 8.44%, up from 8.15% (+0.29pp). OpenResty's market share by domain count remained stable, with a slight 0.01pp increase this month - its small loss of 14,039 domains was counteracted by the greater loss of domains across all vendors this month.
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Jan-Erik Rediger: Five-year Moziversary
I can't believe it's already my fifth Moziversary. It's been 5 years now since I joined Mozilla as a Telemetry engineer, I blogged every year since then: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. As I'm writing this I'm actually off on vacation (and will be for another week or so) and also it's super early here. Nonetheless it's time to look back and forward.
So what have I been up to in the past year? My team changed again. We onboarded Perry and Bruno and when Mike left we got Alessio as the manager of us all. In September we finally met again at the Mozilla All Hands in Hawaii. Not everyone was there, but it was great to meet those that were.
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Mozilla Performance Blog: Improving the Test Selection Experience with Mach Try Perf
If you’ve ever tried to figure out what performance tests you should run to target some component, and got lost in the nomenclature of our CI task names, then you’re not alone!
The current naming for performance tests that you’ll find when you run
./mach try fuzzy
can look like this:test-android-hw-a51-11-0-aarch64-shippable-qr/opt-browsertime-tp6m-essential-geckoview-microsoft-support
. The main reason why these task names are so convoluted is because we run so many different variant combinations of the same test across multiple platforms, and browsers. For those of us who are familiar with it, it’s not too complex. But for people who don’t see these daily, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out what tests they should be running, or even where to start in terms of asking questions. This leads to hesitancy in terms of taking the initiative to do performance testing themselves. In other words, our existing system is not fun, or intuitive to use which prevents people from taking performance into consideration in their day-to-day work.Development
In May of 2022, the Performance team had a work week in Toronto, and we brainstormed how we could fix this issue. The original idea was to essentially to build a web-page, and/or improve the
try chooser
usage (you can find the bug for all of this./mach try perf
work here). However, given that developers were already used to themach try fuzzy
interface, it made little sense for us to build something new for developers to have to learn. So we decided to re-use thefzf
interface from./mach try fuzzy
. I worked with Andrew Halberstadt [:ahal] to build an “alpha” set of changes first which had revealed two issues: (i) runninghg
through the Python subprocess module results in some interesting behaviours, and (ii) our perf selector changes had too much of an impact on the existing./mach try fuzzy
code. From there, I refactored the code for ourfzf
usage to make it easier to use in our perf selector, and so that we don’t impact existing tooling with our changes.The
hg
issue we had was quite interesting. One feature of./mach try perf
is that it performs two pushes by default, one for your changes, and another for the base/parent of your patch without changes. We do this because comparisons with mozilla-central can sometimes result in people comparing apples to oranges due to minor differences in branch-specific setups. This double-push lets us produce a direct Perfherder (or PerfCompare) link in the console after running./mach try perf
to easily, and quickly know if a patch had any impact on the tests.