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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FFS - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
Clean design it's a half of succes.Look at Google - it is not only that powerfully search made it popular like now, but super clean design too.
The Inquirer is also nice and clean...
I 100% understand that you can't please 'em all :).
But cleanness also will bring more speed... Correct me if I'm wrong
And you still could have a style as well (that's why I mentioned [H]ard|OCP - even thou I'm not such a big fun of black and red)
simms - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
We still need a :cookie; emoticon.SlingXShot - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
With all these Anandtech versions, anandtech should be an artifical inteligence already. :-DJasonClark - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
FFS: Can't please em all :). We're happy with it, i do agree about the white background. It's something we're looking at, but it isnt an easy fix with the css layout.L8r.
FFS - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
It is very good article indeed...About speed subjectively it loads slower and slower for me on my FireFox 0.9.2. - but of cause you have benchmarked everything :)
Once I've read on Inq that there are two types of hardware lies: lies and benchmarks :)))
However improving the code for the better one and therefore the speed it is not the only thing about nice web page.
Another thing is design. And I have to admit (again from my point of view) that from version 3 to 5 its mostly regressed.
Especially that gray background covering the article so it's impossible to read during the page loading time, which a pretty long.
PLEASE remove that gray background (keep it white like on v.3)
Tabs on the top - good idea, but bad realization - no clean borders - small fonts e.t.c.
Again news section - even worst one gray on another gray - have you herd about contrast colors? :((
Too be honest best hardware-review site design so far is [H]ard|OCP...
Funny but for me this article sound like excuse for the creating the page, which loads adds very fast but ...(see above)
Is that a hidden feature of .NET We could expect everything from MS (even anti-virus prog :))
Don't get me wrong - I'm also using WinXP, and have the same opinion about it - it is not less stable then Linux in good hands,
although not that stable as Mac OS X even in "simple" hands (again I'm not Apple fun as it could seemed)...
Sorry it was already too much I wrote.
As resume - great team, superb reviews, but sorry - bad web page...
Macaw - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Nice article.The whole .NET framework is pretty extensive. I have some nice things on image-generation from .NET if you want the source. You can use GDI+ from .NET to generate uber cool graphs.
JasonClark - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
SlingXShot, lol jobless? We innovate, so that means writing new code and improving all the time. Sitting on the same code for 10 years doesn't seem very innovative to me. There is ALWAYS room for improvement, thus versions. If people didn't freshen their code we'd still be running windows 3.11 for workgroups, yek.Brickster, we're using SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2003 Enterpise server. That is running on a quad opteron 848 with 8GB of ram and 150 GB Raid 10 array. Can we say overkill :)
SlingXShot - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
JasonClark, just that you have so many version of Anandtech, I guess you need the new versions of software to change code or you would be jobless right?Brickster - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Jason, maybe I missed it, but what database platform are you using with the latest AT 5.0?Thanks again!
Brickster
fbaum - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Heyyo Jason, thx for the reply, and for qualifying the graphs. Would love to see a fair platform compario but that would be a lot of work and as you pointed out that's not really the point. I'm using VS 2003 on a project now, developing a C# .NET web service to interface with a B2B messaging hub, it's kind of complex, and I'm yearning a bit for the more immediately gratifying CF web development I had on my previous project. As a CF fan I felt compelled to put in my $0.02.
Cheers,
Felix