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Making Bugzilla Searches Faster
People often wonder how to make searches in Bugzilla faster on large installations. Two things will give you the most bang for the buck:
- Specify you only want open bugs (if that’s true)
- Specify a product (and, if you know it, a component) to search
Do those two things, and your searches will be much faster.
Coincidentally enough, Bugzilla’s “Simple Search” (BMO version) allows you to specify precisely those two things.
Email Filtering on bugzilla.mozilla.org
Vanilla Bugzilla lets you decide which bugmail you receive based on what changed about a bug. But there are a couple of extensions which give you even more control, and both are installed on bugzilla.mozilla.org. So the new email filtering pipeline is as follows:
Firstly, ComponentWatching, as the name implies, lets you “watch” particular products or components, so you get put on the list to receive bugmail for all changes to any bugs in those products or components. This is very useful if you have an interest in a particular area of the project. You can also watch particular users – that function is built-in.
Secondly, the normal email filters run, which exclude or include you from emails based on the particular fields which have been changed in the bug update.
Lastly, the BugmailFilter extension allows you to define “include” or “exclude” rules based on any one of:
- the field changed
- the current product
- the current component
- your relationship to the bug
- who made the change (useful to exclude changes made by bots).
Using these three capabilities in tandem, it should be possible to carefully control how much bugmail you receive, even if you are using a system like Gmail which does not have good client-side filtering.
Bugzfeed: Bugzilla push notifications
A large number of external applications have grown up around Bugzilla serving a variety of purposes. One thing many of these apps have in common is a need to get updates from Bugzilla. Unfortunately, the only way to get notifications of changes was, until recently, to poll Bugzilla. Everyone knows that polling is bad, particularly because it doesn’t scale well, but until recently there was no alternative.
Thus I would like to introduce to the world Bugzfeed, a WebSocket app that allows you to subscribe to one or more bugs and get pushed notifications when they change. It’s rather a small app, based on Tornado, and has a very simple interface, so it should scale quite nicely. It relies on a few moving parts to work, but I’ll start with the basics and explain the whole system later.
Moving Bugzilla from Bazaar to Git
Or, how to migrate to git using only three programming languages
Another aspect of Bugzilla has been dragged, kicking & screaming, into the future! On March 11, 2014, the Bugzilla source moved to git.mozilla.org. We’re still mirroring to bzr.mozilla.org (more on that later), but the repository of record is now git, meaning it is the only place we accept new code.
Getting over there was no small feat, so I want to record the adventure in the hopes that it can benefit someone else, and so I can look back some day and wonder why I put myself through these things.
Quicksearch Reference
“Quicksearch” is a way of searching Bugzilla using simple yet powerful syntax. The search box at the top of every page supports it.
Jesse Ruderman has written a wonderful Quicksearch Reference – a must-read if you search Bugzilla a lot.
Even Faster Quicksearches
To speed up quicksearches, limit the search by product or component. Add “comp: <string>” to your query to limit it to components whose names contain that string. As an abbreviation, you can simply use “:” instead of “comp:”, although that also searches in products whose names which contain the string.
By analogy with the use of “:”, there are abbreviations for some other common fields as well.
(Thanks to Ben Hearsum and Ed Morley)
Faster Quicksearches
Another guest post from Stefan Arentz:
“If you do a lot of quick searches to find bugs by summary and you don’t care about also looking into the comments of those bugs, flip the “Include comments when performing quick searches (slower)” to NO in your preferences.
A search for ‘radio antenna’ just went down from 30+ seconds to just a few seconds.”
HTML Email
Guest tip from Stefan Arentz:
“Bugzilla actually does have HTML emails! [As of version 4.2, but it’s been backported to bugzilla.mozilla.org’s 4.0 installation – Ed.] I always though that it did not because I did not look further than the “Email Preferences” tab. But there actually is a “Preferred email format” under the “General Preferences” tab.
This makes Bugzilla emails 100x easier to read on a phone.”
The hardware behind bugzilla.mozilla.org
I recently did up a diagram of how our Bugzilla site was set up, mostly for the benefit of other sysadmins trying to find the various pieces of it. Several folks expressed interest in sharing it with the community just to show an example of how we were set up. So I cleaned it up …Upgrading bugzilla.mozilla.org to version 3.4.3
We’re finally at the point where I can say we’re ready to upgrade Bugzilla @ Mozilla this weekend. We’re aiming for Sunday evening (probably 6pm PST). I’ll post again when I know how long it’ll be down for (and that’ll be included in the eventual downtime notice on the IT blog as well). There’s a …Continue reading "Upgrading bugzilla.mozilla.org to version 3.4.3"