AnandTech: A Brief History of Time
by Jason Clark on July 26, 2004 6:52 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
AnandTech 2.0
We decided that Solaris and Oracle were not for us. Not because either one was slow, but simply because the combination of ColdFusion and Oracle was not working out for us. Yes, we could have gone with another language, but we weren't very fond of the choices at that time, and our expertise was in ColdFusion.After doing some basic mock ups and tests, we ended up using Windows NT 4.0 and ColdFusion 4.5.1 SP2, which was rock solid for us. The content management solution didn't change much in this release of the site; we just spent some time re-writing some of our SQL to optimize it for the SQL Server platform.
Our site, and sites like ours, rely on advertising revenue to keep it alive. We had been using Ad Juggler for awhile (a Perl based package at the time) and it was starting to show its weakness as load was increasing. We decided to go with a ColdFusion based package called FuseAds, which we still use to date.
Hardware used in version 2.0
Dual Intel Pentium III Xeon 500 w/1MB L2 Cache and 1GB of memory.
View version 2.0 of the website
AnandTech 3.0
Just like our hardware coverage, our infrastructure is current. Windows 2000 was released and was miles ahead of NT4 in terms of manageability and stability. We waited until Service Pack 1 was released, and then upgraded the servers at approximately the same time when Macromedia acquired Allaire (the makers of ColdFusion), and released ColdFusion 5, which included some serious performance increases and stability improvements. The upgrade went well, and again, we had no issues with the site or the back-end.Since the beginning, we had been using Mediahouse Live Statistics Server to analyze our web logs. We were generating nearly 1GB of logs per server, and we were starting to experience some problems with Statistics Server because of the amount of logs being analyzed. We decided to switch to analog, and write a web-based front end to it. We would analyze the logs into a data file and put it in our database for easier manipulation. This system worked quite well for some time, until our log files became unmanageable.
Bandwidth during this period of our growth was fairly expensive, and was starting to cost us significant amount of money to maintain. The HTTP 1.1 protocol had included an innovation called HTTP Compression. Since it had been out for awhile and was supported by over 90% of our readers browsers, we decided to implement it. We cut our bandwidth in half, which, needless to say, had cut our expenses by a significant amount. This version of the website was the longest running version.
Hardware used in version 3.0
5 x Dual AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz w/ 768MB of memory
View version 3.0 of the website
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bobbozzo - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
Jason, would you be willing to publish your # of monthly pageviews?We're running a single quad xeon server and wondering whether to get a faster server or a cluster. We're at almost 4million page views/mo; over 1/3 of those are searching our database.
Thanks
JasonClark - Monday, August 2, 2004 - link
A behind the scenes hardware upgrade is coming soon.czakalw3 - Monday, August 2, 2004 - link
"have learned more in 3-4 years than some people do in their entire career."nice one.
beyond all the technical considerations, it seems your change of platform is nothing but a "were already commited to ms in the os so why not go all the way?"
dont label me as a fundamentalist but cost could easily be 0 with the same results?
czakalw3 - Monday, August 2, 2004 - link
errDevnut - Saturday, July 31, 2004 - link
One thing that seemed to be lacking in this article that was present in all the past "anandtech upgrade" articles, was much more detail in relation to the hardware changes/upgrades, and why you did what you did.I noticed Jason indicated SQL2000 was running on a quad opteron, so there's obviously been some significant changes. Can we expect an update on this front?
Zoomer - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link
Would you please post load information for your quad opteron?It would be interesting, to say the least.
Staples - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
I saw this article posted a few days ago but just decided to look at the comments to see how many posts it took for the Linux fanboys to show themselves. Apparently not long. Anywho, I am just starting out with the whole .net thing since I have heard such good things about it. This article is just another one.RZaakir - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
Man I wish the these PHP fanboys would realize that Microsoft actually has a few good products. I think that PHP is superior to ASP classic in many ways but PHP (version 4 anyway) and ASP.NET aren't even in the same league. Period. You'd be better off making a JSP vs. ASP.NET argument as they are similar products.Does MySQL have stored procedures in a production version yet?
JasonClark - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
FFS, I don't care for HardOCP's design, it's dated and the black background isnt for us... THe design looks great, I think the only way to get more clean is to remove more ads... but that isn't going to happen. Speed-wise, I think you have some issues somewhere, here the page shows in less than 3 tenths of a second. Benchmarks indicate about 2 tenths.Macaw - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
You've been blogged: http://blogs.msdn.com/jrule