Self-Introduction: Fergus Sullivan

[Fergus Sullivan]

Many thanks to each of you for the very kind welcome.  We're looking  
forward to working with you guys.

There are a couple of open questions that we haven't yet covered, so  
there's more info below.

   /ferg


== How do we have dual-master sql proxies? ==
We have our own secret sauce for this.  It's in use across Yahoo and  
is central to our BCP/HA planning.  It's proprietary, and not  
currently on our list to release to open source.  I have, however,  
prodded its owners about that.  Essentially it allows us to switch  
from Master A to Master B the moment Master A fails a health check.   
We put the two masters in different server farms so as to reduce  
their vulnerability.

== What is BCP/HA? ==
Business Continuity Planning is a means to ensure that if our primary  
colo goes down we can switch to another as needed.  It assumes a  
certain amount of downtime as dns records are switched and boxes are  
spun up.  This could be anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours.

High Availability means that the service should never go down, and  
automatically switch to a backup server farm as needed.

In both cases, the systems exist to allow for natural disasters,  
power outages, war, insurrection, comets or acts of god.  Read your  
insurance policy's exclusion policy for more...

In both cases, data in each location needs to be up to date.

== How many Bugzilla servers does Yahoo have ==
A couple of years ago we had 1.  Then we bumped up to three.   
Currently we're at one db master and three slaves which share the  
http and search load.  These sit behind a load-balancer.

Our next hardware revision will bump us to one master and four slaves  
in each of two server farms.  One farm is on the US west coast, the  
other on the east.  The primary goal of this is HA, not server load.

We are evaluating the need for mirrors local to our users in Asia and  
Europe.

We have one read-only mirror where we let users run their own raw sql  
queries.

And we have "The Bug Hole", which is where your query is sent if it  
requires a full table scan.  This type of query was blocking other  
users and hogging our search resources.

Incoming mail has always been a part of our instance and shares one  
of the other servers.

== What's this YUI thing, and why will Ferg be harping on about it  
for the next six months? ==
YUI is the Yahoo User Interface libraries.  These were released under  
the FreeBSD license a year and a half ago.  They are widely used,  
both at Yahoo and outside.  Airline sites like southwest.com and  
northwest.com make heavy use of them.

The YUI libraries include widgets like datatables, grid management,  
dialog management, CSS levelling, trees, drag and drop etc.  They are  
fully functional cross-platform and cross-browser.

I joke with the YUI guys that their work makes bad engineers look  
good.  My point is that a little time with the libraries can make the  
trickiest tasks easy.  For example, we decided to pipe the content of  
buglist.cgi into a datatable so that we could sort it client-side.   
It took one of our guys two days to get it working.

The YUI team sit across the aisle from us.  When we need a new  
feature, we wander over and ask.  We dreamed up the idea of how cool  
it would be to be able to edit a bug list in place, like an excel  
sheet.  We walked over to the YUI guys and asked them if it could be  
done.  And lo, inline editing in the datatable was born.

Here are some of my favorite examples, and how we could use them in  
Bugzilla.

Datatable - inline editing of the buglist.  Browse around to see  
examples of client-side sorting and pagination goodies.  Don't  
neglect the client-side pagination with browser history.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/datatable/dt_cellediting.html

TreeView - Dependencies anyone?
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/treeview/default_tree.html

Calendar and Autocomplete - We already use these in our Bugzilla code  
Yahoo
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/calendar/quickstart.html

Grids - For clean layout
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/calendar/quickstart.html

There are many, many other uses besides.  For us, use of the YUI  
libraries has been the best thing ever.  The only catch bugzilla.org  
needs to consider is that if we all go with YUI we'll never want to  
turn back.

== Test harnesses ==
As dwm mentioned, we have a suite of tests that use an internal Yahoo  
tool.  We try hard to keep our tests up to date with a 100% pass rate.

We have a number of test machines.  These are mainly for load testing  
in the form of log replays.

== The Yahoo Product Chooser ==
With 2,500 products we needed an optimized product chooser.  To be  
honest, I'm not at all happy with its current form, so we may well  
change it in the near future.  We're thinking of something analogous  
to an address book module in a mail client.  Essentially we want to  
make it easier to select one or many products, and steer people away  
from searching 'all'.

== When can Yahoo start offering its patches for review ==
It depends.  We have an internal legal process to approve  
engagement.  That'll take a few weeks to complete.  We should be able  
to offer minor patches soon after.

The larger patches will be tricky, as they work for us right now with  
the rest of our code base.  Remember our code is based on 2.22 and  
chunks of it are modified.  That said, our Search.pm is a thing of  
beauty...