Mozilla Marketing Engineering & Operations blog

Kuma Report, November 2017

, by John Whitlock

Here’s what happened in November in Kuma, the engine of MDN Web Docs:

We’re planning on more of the same for December.

Done in November

Shipped the First Interactive Examples

We’ve launched the new interactive examples on 20+ pages. Try them out on the pages for the CSS property box-shadow and the JavaScript method Array.slice.

box-shadow example

We’re monitoring the page load impact of this limited rollout, and if the results are good, we have another 400 examples ready to go, thanks to Mark Boas and others. Mark also added a JavaScript Interactive Examples Contributing Guide, so that contributors can create even more.

We want the examples to be as fast as possible. Schalk Neethling improved the page load speed of the <iframe> by using preload URLs (PR 4537). Stephanie Hobson and Schalk dived into HTTP/2, and identified require.js as a potential issue for this protocol (Kuma PR 4521 and Interactive Examples PR 329). Josh Mize added appropriate caching headers for the examples and static assets (PR 326).

For the next level of speed gains, we’ll need to speed up the MDN pages themselves. One possibility is to serve developer.mozilla.org from a CDN, which will require big changes to make pages more cacheable. One issue is waffle flags, which allow us to experiment with per-user changes, at the cost of making pages uncacheable. Schalk has made steady progress in eliminating inactive waffle flag experiments, and this work will continue into December.

Continued Migration of Browser Compatibility Data

The Browser Compatibility Data project was the most active MDN project in November. 36.6% of the MDN pages (2284 total) have been converted. Here are some highlights:

  1. Imported more CSS data, such as the huge list of allowed values for the list-style-type property (this list uses georgian). This property alone required 7 PRs, starting with PR 576. Daniel D. Beck submitted 32 CSS PRs that were merged in November, and is making good progress on converting CSS data.
  2. Added browser and version validation, a month-long effort in PR 439 from Florian Scholz and Jean-Yves Perrier.
  3. Added a runtime_flag for features that can be enabled at browser startup (PR 615 from Florian Scholz).
  4. Add the first compatibility data for Samsung Internet for Android (PR 657 from first-time contributor Peter O'Shaughnessy).
  5. Shipped the new compatibility table to beta users. Stephanie Hobson resurrected a design that had been through a few rounds of user testing (PR 4436), and has made further improvements such as augmenting colors with gradients (PR 4511). For more details and to give us feedback, see Beta Testing New Compatability Tables on Discourse.

New Browser Compatibiility Table

Sticky Table of Contents and Other Article Improvements

We shipped some additional article improvements in November.

The new table of contents is limited to the top-level headings, and “sticks” to the top of the window at desktop sizes, showing where you are in a document and allowing fast navigation (PR 4510 from Stephanie Hobson).

Sticky Table of Contents

The breadcrumbs (showing where you are in the page hierarchy) have moved to the sidebar, and now has schema.org metadata tags. Stephanie also refreshed the style of the sidebar links.

Breadcrumbs and Quick Links

Stephanie also updated the visual hierarchy of article headings. This is most noticeable on <h3> elements, which are now indented with black space.

New <h3> style

Improved MDN in AWS and Kubernetes

We continued to have performance and uptime issues in AWS in November. We’re prioritizing fixing these issues, and we’re delaying some 2017 plans, such as improving KumaScript translations and upgrading Django, to next year.

We lost GZip compression in the move to AWS. Ryan Johnson added it back in PR 4522. This reduced the average page download time by 71% (0.57s to 0.16s), and contributed to a 6% decrease in page load time (4.2 to 4.0s).

Page Download drop due to GZip

Heavy load due to scraping caused 6 downtimes totaling 35 minutes. We worked to improve the performance of unpopular pages that get high traffic from scrapers, such as document list views (PR 4463 from John Whitlock) and the revisions dashboard (PR 4520 from Josh Mize). This made the system more resilient.

Kubernetes was contributing to the downtimes, by restarting web servers when they started to undergo heavy load and were slow to respond. We’ve adjusted our “readiness” and “liveness” probes so that Kubernetes will be more patient and more gentle (Infra PR 665 from Ryan Johnson).

These changes have made MDN more resilient and reliable, but more work will be needed in December.

Stephanie Hobson fixed the development favicon appearing in production (PR 4530), as well as an issue with lazy-loading web fonts (PR 4533).

Ryan Johnson continues work on our deployment process. Pushing certain branches will cause Jenkins to take specific deployment steps. Pushing master will run tests and publish a Docker image. Pushing stage-push will deploy that image to stage.mdn.moz.works. Pushing stage-integration-tests will run browser and HTTP tests against that deployment. We’ll make these steps more reliable, add production variants, and then link them together into automated deployment pipelines.

Shipped Tweaks and Fixes

There were 260 PRs merged in November:

Many of these were from external contributors, including several first-time contributions. Here are some of the highlights:

Planned for December

Mozilla gathers for the All-Hands event in Austin, TX in December, which gives us a chance to get together, celebrate the year’s accomplishments, and plan for 2018. Mozilla offices will shut down for the last full week of December. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for coding.

We’ll continue working on the projects we worked on in November. We’ll convert more Browser Compatibility data. We’ll tweak the AWS infrastructure. We’ll eliminate and convert more waffle flags. We’ll watch the interactive examples and improved compatibility tables, and ship them when ready.

We’ll also take a step back, and ask if we’re spending time and attention on the most important things. We’ll think about our processes, and how they could better support our priorities.

But mostly, we’ll try not to mess things up, so that we can enjoy the holidays with friends and family, and come back refreshed for 2018.

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