Techie question

Dear owners and techs of ATS,

don't answer my question if you feel there is a trade secret that may be revealed. I noticed a very good performance of the board with nearly instant updates in a few panels. What's your storage backend? What's the middleware?

Thanks!

You may want to read what Skeptic Overlord has to say about their servers at the link.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Aquarius1


Thank you. As awesome as the hardware is, the thread you referred me to contains little info (unless I missed it) on the database and the rest of the middleware. What's the web framework or CMS, database engine, etc? Curious.

Skeptic Overlord talks about the servers and how many throughout that thread, since it is so huge I don't have the time or inclination to look for those posts, good luck.

reply to post by buddhasystem


I would focus more on the hosting provider, not sure who ATS uses. My only experience is with GoDaddy (yea I know) and Rackspace - night and day. But, you have to pay for performance.

reply to post by buddhasystem


Our stuff is a devil's mix of some exotic concepts, and relatively mundane stuff.

The database server is standard MySQL 5.__ on a multi-core server using solid state hard drives. On top of that is plain-ol PHP with no framework, so to speak. All of the code is custom, and suited to ATS's needs.

It's more exotic when we marry scripts that generate semi-dynamic content on a scheduled basis, with on-demand single-file RSYNC scripts that propagate the content across our servers faster than any other method.

And then it gets really exotic with our custom code that decides which ad to show visitors -- quite possibly the only such system ever devised with no database and zero latency... and that's all I can say about that without having you sign 37 pages of confidentiality materials.

Gone are the Apache servers perhaps.
Thats the only key word I remember when looking into how the net works.
Years later it was still around.
It was free.
I don't think Netscape had enough of a program to persuade many to buy their server.

Hello SO, thanks for the detailed post, much appreciated.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

...
The database server is standard MySQL 5.__ on a multi-core server using solid state hard drives. On top of that is plain-ol PHP with no framework, so to speak. All of the code is custom, and suited to ATS's needs.

I don't doubt the latter What's the total amount of data you handle? What do you use for text queries? How do you store text of the messages, as varchar or blob or what?

Thanks. It's just that I'm looking at noSQL technology right now (actually using it) and I wanted to see how far you managed to push the MySQL/PHP platform.

What Web server do you run?

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
And then it gets really exotic with our custom code that decides which ad to show visitors -- quite possibly the only such system ever devised with no database and zero latency...

is it:
display_ad($ads[rand(0, count($ads))]);
?

reply to post by goatfish


Not even close.

Though, long long ago (around 2007), that isn't too dissimilar to something we tried, and which failed miserably.



As to the other questions, I'd love to expound on some of our aggressive techniques that keep a site running smoothly that averages 1.4 terabytes of monthly data pulled from our database server/cluster to our cluster of web servers through an average of 150-180 queries a second, but there are those who might seek to use that information to cause mischief. We also experience a somewhat high rate of weekly attempts to hack things.