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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Brickster - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Great article!!! Thank you so much for publishing this, as it is a testament to Anandtech's drive to help the community understand and appreciate hardware AND software technology for all that it can help us in our personal and business ventures.Personally, I am starting a database driven website, and have been looking for advice on what approach to take. This insight has helped me TREMENDOUSLY, and I thank you for the article!
Keep up the good work and do let us know how things go!
Cheers,
Brickster
JasonClark - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Geesh jason, spell. Use what best fits your business.JasonClark - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
AutomaticErik, and .NET has a lot of advantages over PHP, PHP is most certainly no better than .NET. They both have their uses, and their different target markets. Use what your best fits your business, thats the bottom line. PHP does not fit our system infrastructure, so we use .NET.washboard - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Maybe this is not the place, BUTUsing Mozilla 1.7 with "enable Java Script on" site loads very slow. With it off the site is snappy. Don't have the problem with IE. Have a very fast DSL connection. Love this site, keep up the good work.
Thanks
John Coleman
AutomaticErik - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
I've been doing web design and database management for years and I've never once run across a project that wouldn't be able to use PHP/MySQL. I think most don't realize the true power you have with a PHP/MySQL setup. Its certainly every bit as powerful as any of the other soultions out there and in most tests and benchmarks, its faster and more efficient. I've even run personal benchmarks and found this to be true.All in all, people use what they are comfortable with and in that respect, PHP isn't for everyone. But it does hold many advantages over .NET. Most just don't mess around with it enough to find that out.
JasonClark - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Sling, we actually should run whatever we want to..., or whatever we feel works well in our environment. PHP isn't for everyone and holds no advantage over .NET. .NET is free, granted the OS is not but neither are commercial linux solutions like redhat or suse?. Again, we like windows, it works just as well as linux and fits our needs just fine.L8r.
SlingXShot - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Btw Jason, you have a bug. You should write some kind of script to warn the user when clicking Post Comment when this form box is empty.SlingXShot - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
So many updates, you guys should have started with php, no costs running that. With PHP when there is an update, and you are using old code, there is always a easy very around it, with quick fixes. I can't wait to play around with PHP 5.SlingXShot - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
sonicDivx - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Jason,Thx for the reply, yeah I was wondering would make a great case study. Also be a good lesson for developers. Glad its all worked for ya, and my interest is peaked in looking at VS 2003.
That's cool. I'll tell my co-worker who is Alpha testing Blackstone (next version of CF) that they really need to keep these things in mind.