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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Phiro - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
So how are you laid out? Are your web servers clustered? Are you using App Center? Component Load Balancing? Request forwarding?JasonClark - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
In regards to linux, our expertise lies in windows and it hasn't given us any grief what so ever. Windows can be stable if it is administrated properly.Code is as bloated as the developer makes it, experience, experience...
joeld - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
alfatekpt - what are the advantages of PHP/MySql over Windows and the .Net platform? I haven't researched this much, but I am under the impression that a SQL server is better than a MySQL server, and would guess that PHP/Apache would be a little faster than IIS/.NET, but that's just a guess. I know it's very easy to code on .NET, which can make your pages bloated if you are not careful - something that hardly happens with PHP.alfatekpt - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
You have servers with high needs and you use Windows and .NET plataform... I don't need to be a big *nix zealot to say that is so wrong...You never tried PHP/MySql? You can save the money in software to hire a linux sys admin to tune your servers...
vda - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
vda - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Did you ever considered using Linux?sonicDivx - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Very Interesting. Im a ColdFusion developer so kinda bummed that you had switched. Looking at the performance numbers, I was wondering was % of improvement can be attributed to .Net and wondering did you try recoded routines in MX to do a performance comparisons ( always new ways to skin a cat).Just curious from an informational standpoint.
Thx
ChucklesHB - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
I got turned onto Anandtech about... 2 years ago (the 3.0 version was only around a short time) and I've been a fan ever since.As a web developer myself, it's great to see sites that don't have an issue with showing the evolution of the technology behind the scenes. Thanks for a peek behind the curtains. ;)
Creig - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
It'd be nice to be able to go through the old news/forums again. Maybe they could be rehosted on a "Limited time only" basis so the oldtimers could reminisce and the newcomers could see cutting edge overclocking with a 300a Celeron that would do 450. :)RZaakir - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Cool article,But come on now, ASP.NET syntax is VERY different from ASP. If for no other reason than the fact that you're going from VBScript to VB and Javascript to J#/C#.
Not to mention the other features like User/Server controls (as opposed to SSIs), Assemblies (as opposed to COM Objects), and language independence. Though ASP was a bit more flexible than many people thought on the latter.