Google Groups and Amazon S3

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Two new improvements have just gone into place to help improve the quality of the jQuery site.

The jQuery Mailing List is now hosted with Google Groups.

This move is going to help provide huge increases in the overall speed, and quality, of the jQuery mailing list. At the time of the move we were sending out, approximately, 4.5m emails per month. Unfortunately, the list was prone to folding under the high server load; and the amount of effort required to keep it performing nicely was simply too much to ignore.

The best feature of the new mailing list (besides the increased reliability) is the addition of Google Groups’ wonderful web-based interface. I hope that everyone who’s asked for a forum can now be content knowing that they can browse the jQuery list, and easily reply to posts, without ever having to subscribe to incoming messages.

Note: If you were a member of the old mailing list, you should be completely moved to the new one. All old messages and users were moved over, and everything should be intact.

Complete instructions on how to use the main discussion mailing list, and all the other jQuery mailing lists, can be found on here: jQuery Mailing Lists.

All code is now hosted with Amazon S3.

As a project, we’ve never discouraged first time users from using the jQuery Source Code straight from their personal site; it helps to get new users started with development, without having to worry about keeping their code up to date.

Needless to say, the number of users who’ve directly used the jQuery source directly from the jQuery site has increased dramatically in recent months (with some large-scale sites directly pulling from jQuery.com). This still isn’t a huge problem, but it’s something that the web server hosting jQuery.com shouldn’t have to worry about. For that reason, all jQuery source code has been moved to Amazon S3, for example: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js.

The jQuery site has been using the code directly from Amazon S3 for over two weeks now and I’ve been very pleased with the results. The number of files requested has dropped dramatically, giving the web server more time to serve the normal jQuery web pages.

Note: All old requests to http://jquery.com/src/… are being redirected to the http://code.jquery.com/… sub-domain (which is managed by Amazon).

A nice thing about this move is that we can soon start providing dedicated hosting for plugins. Once we figure out the logistics of the plugin repository (which is currently under development), we’ll be sure to make that a priority.

Additionally, static jQuery.com files (like stylesheets, images, and JavaScript files) are being hosted directly from Amazon S3 too (static.jquery.com). This is also helping to alleviate any strain on the server that may be present.

As always, if you get any errors on the jQuery site, please be sure to send a message to the mailing list, where we can find it and help to solve the problem.

1.1.3 News

All of these site issues have delayed jQuery 1.1.3 slightly, but now that they’re out of the way we should be back on track for having a 1.1.3 alpha out by the end of this week. This update is going to include significant updates to the performance of jQuery animations and huge speed increases to the selector engine; as well as fixing over 20 outstanding bugs. We hope to have an update concerning all of this, shortly.

11 thoughts on “Google Groups and Amazon S3”

  1. Nate on said:

    See, what did I tell you? The sooner you succumb to our Google overlords, the easier everything is. ;-) Glad to see jQuery kicking so much ass.

  2. Mladen Mihajlovic on said:

    It seems that Amazon’s S3 does not want to work through our proxy here at work. Which basically means that from now on half the sites using jquery (and obviously your site) will not be viewable from here.

    I’m sure I’m not the only one who has this problem?

  4. John Resig on said:

    @Mladen: I’m confused as to what you’re saying – is the whole jQuery site unviewable for you? Because, currently, everything is being hosted directly from it. So if you’re able to see images (for example) here on the jQuery site, then S3 should be working just fine for you.

    Blocking S3 seems like a really strange restriction. I know of a number of sites that are using S3 to serve up all of their static content, with much success. Unless I’m mistaken, your case with the proxy seems to be the exception. Although, if anyone else is having the same problems as Mladen, please let me know.

  5. John Resig on said:

    @Pratham: Absolutely. Barring any unforeseen situations, I think this will be a great opportunity for jQuery users to have a single host for their jQuery code. I’m not entirely sure how much of our monthly bandwidth is dedicated to pushing out the jQuery code, but I suspect that it isn’t that much (comparatively). So, yes, feel free to point your script src to code.jquery.com, I suspect that it’ll work quite well.

  7. Mladen Mihajlovic on said:

    The S3 site is not being blocked as far as I can see, but there seems to be some funny/strange error occurring as it just times out all the time. This has been happening since it’s inception. Anyway, I’m sure it’s only my side – which I will try and sort out with our admins. I will let you know what it was if we manage to sort it out.

  8. Jon Davis on said:

    Isn’t Amazon S3 going to cost you a chunk of money at the end of every month if you encourage people link there?

    Even at Amazon’s $0.20 per GB, it’s going to end up costing you quite a bit in monthly fees–I hope you can cover it with money you make from jquery or get Amazon to sponsor you.

  9. John Resig on said:

    @Jon: I don’t have a huge problem with it. The current hosting bill is considerable as it is – but having all of the code files be managed will simply save me time and energy (which is well worth the money). It’ll be interesting to see how much is spent by the end of the month. I suspect that it won’t be “that bad”, but that remains to be seen.

  10. Mike on said:

    Is there an expected release date for jQuery 1.1.3? Pretty excited to give it a try :)