… as being the smoothest release I have ever participated in, despite the major constraint I had this year: no extra bandwidth shall be purchased.
Here is how we pulled this off:
1. More bandwidth. Since we got sooo many new Friends of Eclipse, I bent the rules and added 12 megabits of bandwidth [1]. But — get this — for the pre-release only. Marker (1) shows the increase, and marker (2) shows a significant drop three hours into the release. Unheard of!
2. Early access. Friends of Eclipse, mirror sites and Member companies all had early access to the bits, relieving some of the stress on release day.
3. BitTorrent. In April, I didn’t have options (4) and (5) below, so with the no-extra-bandwidth rule, I had to set up something. Actually, I suspect many Friends took advantage of their benefits by downloading and pre-seeding many of the files before release day. More seeds == faster downloads.
4. Eclipse Member companies. They provided lots of bandwidth (and still are!) via the Get It Faster section of the download page. Many thanks!
5. Amazon Web Services. This was a last-minute deal that was/is a true blessing, since I was able to redirect lots of the download.eclipse.org requests to AWS instead of our stressed mirror sites.
6. Server virtualization. Our own version of ‘the Cloud on demand’ — I enabled an extra virtual server node for www.eclipse.org on June 23 to handle the extra CPU power that would be required to handle the many requests. I may just shut it off later next week, or I may just keep it around…
I think we’re getting good at these annual release trains..
[1] In reality, we get billed by the 95th percentile, so if I played my cards right, the extra bandwidth may end up costing us next to nothing.
So I needed to install Eclipse on my Mac at home and today was the day. Doh. Release day. I decided to give bittorrent a shot to see how things went. Well it took about 10 minutes to download and I was getting sometimes in excess of 800K per second according to Transmission. This really worked great this year. I wasn’t involved at all, Denis did all the work on that and deserves all the credit. I imagine Windows downloads were even better.
This site makes it look like they’re serving up Eclipse 3.5 already. Links all go to download.eclipse.org.
http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/entwicklung/eclipse_sdk/
Not cool.
Galileo will be available tomorrow, but Friends of Eclipse and BitTorrent users can get it now. Beat the rush!
A new IDE package will be avaible for Galileo this year: a PHP IDE. This package will include Eclipse 3.5, the PDT, Webtools and Mylyn.
I’ve been waiting a long time for this. This will make working fun again*. Get it on June 24, when Galileo is launched. Or, become a Friend of Eclipse and get it sooner.
* Note to my boss: working is still fun. I’m just adding drama for the blog post.
If you have modest graphics design skills, you can likely create a Galileo Wallpaper in less than five minutes. If you attach it to this bug, then your name will be forever etched in the Eclipse Hall of Fame.
You can use some of Nathan’s work on this page as a starting point. Perhaps Nathan can attach the EPS file(s) for it in that bug?
I have finally fixed most of our build process, and we’re building language packs once again. Just download the Galileo language pack(s), unzip them into your dropins folder and launch Eclipse with the -nl (locale) switch. Report any problems against Babel.
We’re not producing a p2 Update site for Galileo yet since we still have some issues to fix.
Can you spot the Friend of Eclipse?
The Portal will finally fully support components/sub-sub-projects! It has been some time since we updated the development process to work with components, but our software has been lagging sadly behind. Updating all of the code has been a big project as there are so many changes that needed to be made to integrate this everywhere. Project meta-data and elections were not supported for components in the Portal which has been a bit of a headache for committers, leads, and Foundation staff.
No more! I have spent a good bit of time over the last several weeks getting everything up and running. We will be deploying the code later this week. Due to the complexity of the code involved, and the massive number of dependencies throughout the infrastructure, it’s likely I missed something. But you, the wonderful Eclipse community, will undoubtedly give us a gentle nudge if you find something that needs attention. 
