AnandTech: A Brief History of Time
by Jason Clark on July 26, 2004 6:52 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
AnandTech 4.0
This release of the site was a fairly major upgrade in terms of back-end code. We decided to do a rewrite on the site code, which we have been using since version 2.0. ColdFusion MX had been released, and AnandTech was used as a high load test site during the beta of ColdFusion MX. Needless to say, we beat on it and found a few issues here and there that were fixed prior to MX's release. One of the significant changes in the ColdFusion language was the ability to form code components into a web-based API, which really helped us organize the code into more reusable sections.Reporting of web statistics was starting to cause us some grief in this release due to the amount of clustered servers and log file size. We obtained a quote from WebTrends for their software, but it was going to cost around $15,000 for our server farm. We felt that analyzing log files was archaic, and we decided to make our own statistics tracking system. Development of the web statistics system took a couple of weeks, and is the same system that we use to date.
Just as our traffic was increasing, so was the size of our editoral staff, and the amount of content being published. Anand and the other editors asked for an easier way to create their graphs; basically, a central system to manage the data that goes in the graphs and to be able to re-generate them without having to upload images. So, we did some research and found a fantastic piece of software called SwiffChart from GlobFX, a company in France. This graphing engine allowed us to construct our graphs programmatically from our content management system. SwiffChart gave us a number of file formats in which to save the generated graphs. We had originally used Flash because of its file size when compressed (smaller than any other conventional format). We recently switched to PNG format, the next smallest format due to the number of readers who can't have the plugin or want it for that matter. To date, we still use this graphing system, although it has been enhanced over the past year with various features to make it even easier for our editorial staff to use.
During this release, we had a few issues with the Windows version of Apache, which we used because of mod_gzip (HTTP Compression) module. Apache wasn't threading properly on Windows at that time (prior to version 2 of Apache). We decided to switch to IIS, and a HTTP compression module called PipeBoost, which we still use now. The next upgrade was the largest in the history of the site.
Hardware used in version 4.0
5 x Dual AMD Athlon MP 1900+ w/ 512MB Memory
View version 4.0 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