Self-Introduction: Fergus Sullivan

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:31:33 -0700 Fergus Sullivan
<fergus at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> == Anything else you'd like to say ==
> Yahoo has been happily using Bugzilla for the last six years.  We
> now have a mandate from our top-level management to contribute to
> the open source effort.

	Yay! :-) Welcome!

> We use a mixture of MyISAM and InnoDB.

	Yeah, we do the same thing upstream now (In 3.1).

> We have a dual-master database (we have our own  proxy that can
> switch as needed)

	Wow, dual master for MySQL, eh? I assume by "our own" means
that your wrote it yourself? What are you using to dual-master them?

>  We have a second colo for BCP

	BCP?

> Our database currently stands at about 1.5 million bugs and grows at  
> about 50k per month.

	That makes you, as far as I'm aware, the second largest
Bugzilla installation in the world, and because nobody knows anything
about the largest, you may be the largest.

> I have an open req for a visual designer to polish up the UI in  
> Bugzilla, and then in our other internal tools.

	We'd definitely love that. Have you seen any of our upstream
work on that?

> The main cause was lock contention within the DB.

	Ha! I *knew* that would happen on large installations!! I feel
vindicated. :-) It's just that it's nearly impossible to discover that
in a test environment.

	Anyhow, upstream is going wholly into transactions, which
should resolve it.

> A two line change improved our "search for bugs where person X is
> cced" from 45 seconds to 0.4 seconds.

	I seem to recall making a similar fix upstream, also. :-)

>  Other changes were vast.  The
> overall effect was search times have dropped from up to 45 seconds in
> typical usage to about six seconds.

	You'll see even more improvement with mod_perl, too. :-) That
six seconds is probably a lot of page-load and compile time.

> Product Management
>   - With 2,400 different products, the vanilla product chooser does  
> not scale for us.  We have built an entirely different version.

	Yeah, that's a well-known thing. Our idea was to AJAX it. What
did you guys do?

>   - We have made many minor and a few major changes to the UI.  One  
> interesting one is the use of a JavaScript datatable for client-side  
> sorting of buglist results.  This greatly reduces server load.

	Yeah, a definitely common request:

	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151686

>   - We have unified comments and the bug activity table.  Both
> appear inline in the show bug page.

	Also a common request:

	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11368

>   - We are making increasing use of the YUI library.  These allow
> our fancier functions to work on all platforms.

	We might be willing to consider that upstream, but we'd have to
see that it was a technical advantage over other solutions, and that the
licensing allowed it to be shipped with Bugzilla.

	Of course, within Yahoo it's the obvious choice, but for
upstream we have to have technical proof that it's the best choice. :-)

>   - We have many contact points with other developer tools within  
> Yahoo.  Our Bugzilla interfaces with our CVS repository, with  
> Perforce and with Subversion.

	This is probably shameless self-promotion, but you might be
interested in VCI. :-)

	http://search.cpan.org/dist/VCI/

>   - We integrate with our employee directory to show pictures of  
> employees in bugs, and to provide other information.

	That's neat. We just added a feature to show a picture for
groups, but pictures for individuals might be handy as well. Launchpad
does something like that.

> As you can tell, we take Bugzilla seriously here.  I'm looking  
> forward to contributing to the bugzilla.org effort!

	Wow, and we're looking forward to your contributions! :-)

	-Max
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