We had a lot going on during Monday’s downtime. One small, yet important, event was the powering down of the 7 Talos machines running on FF2.0.0.x / mozilla-1.8.0.

These machines came online in December2007, and were originally needed for performance comparisons with the “new development work” going into Firefox3.0 at the time. Which was great. But, we’ve long since shipped Firefox 3.0, and most developers have moved on to FF3.1 and FF3.next. The world has moved on, so powering off these machines seemed useful because:

• these machines can now be recycled and put to use where we need them more – doing talos or build work on other, more active, code lines.
• this simplifies our life when doing Talos improvements for FF3.0,  FF3.1 and mozilla-central. There’s interesting differences in how Talos collects info across the various release branches. By turning off this set of Talos machines, it removes one set of cross-testing we have to do. This improves our “drag coefficient” when making changes to Talos for other branches.
• minor incremental reduction of load on graphserver (recall that on FF2, we build continuously, meaning we also test, and post results continuously!)
• no-one was using them anymore. We spend much of our time supporting machines that people actually use. This made powering off unused machines, especially before the EOL of FF2.0.0.x, a psychologically important milestone.

Many thanks to everyone for the honest, and flexible, discussions in bug#463325 and the “Power off unused FF2.0, FF3.0 machines?” thread in dev.planning leading up to this.