Behind AnandTech - 2001 Server Upgrade

Our Senior Developer and Webmaster, Jason Clark, explains the software side of things here at AnandTech:

AnandTech Web Architecture

Evolution exists in all areas of technology. One of the main areas of evolution has been the progression of delivery of web content. AnandTech was originally serving content from static HTML pages. While this solution is the least demanding form of content delivery, and the most cost effective, it has some fundamental drawbacks.

Static Content

As sites grow, so does their maintenance, and complexity levels. Posting content to the web using the static HTML delivery format is simple for small infrastructures, where there aren't many dependencies. A site like AnandTech, however, requires that links be created to point to the document, and the necessary HTML be included for the site's look and feel. Once you have hundreds of documents published, and thousands of news posts posted per year, this method of content delivery begins to show its weakness. When the time comes, and it will, to do a new look and feel for the web site, the site maintainer is left with the task of editing thousands of HTML pages -- a very tedious job. As site popularity increases, so does the need for more user interactivity. Searching content and filtering content by type are not easy tasks in the static HTML delivery format.

Dynamic Content

Database driven web sites have been around for quite some time; their popularity, however, has dramatically increased over the last few years. AnandTech saw the need to move to a more efficient manner of delivering content to end-users. The first iteration of the dynamic web site started with a Sun Solaris environment. AnandTech chose the Allaire ColdFusion Web Application Server as the front-end. For the back-end (database), Oracle 8i was implemented. This system was touch-and-go, due to some problems in the Solaris port of ColdFusion. Oracle was a good platform for the back-end, but unkind in terms of the cost of ownership. The more time people have to spend administrating a system, the higher the cost of ownership becomes. As the days are most certainly not getting longer, this raised some issues for us.

Why ColdFusion?

Many people asked why ColdFusion was implemented, and why not some of the various other available software platforms. The main reason is time to market. ColdFusion's ease of HTML integration is its main strength. Every web application platform has its strengths and its weaknesses. But, the main weakness in web application is the actual source code. All of the mainstream web-application platforms are similar in performance. It's just a matter of how well the code is written. This is most always the determining factor.

Moving to the NT Platform

After learning a few hard lessons, AnandTech moved on to the plaftform that ColdFusion was the most mature on, "NT". AnandTech also switched from Oracle 8i to a SQL7/2000 environment, which greatly improved administration time. There was no performance drop from Oracle 8 to SQL 7. In fact, in some cases, performance improved.