Under the Covers: Architecture at AnandTech and the Performance of ASP.NET
by Jason Clark on November 27, 2004 12:10 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Our bread and butter is up next
We're an online publication. It's no secret that advertising is what keeps AnandTech running, so this was the next critical piece of our migration. For years, we've been using FuseAds, which is a ColdFusion based ad serving software package. Since we were moving to a completely ASP.NET backend, we now had to be able to track our advertising within our new architecture.We decided to split up our ad tracking routines into essentially "ad display" and "ad track" applications. Our display functionality selects the right ad for the portion of the site that the user is on, and the tracking software keeps track of how many times an ad was viewed and clicked on. It might seem simple at first glance, but we built these applications for enterprise load. The tracking software runs in memory and dumps to the RDBS every x minutes (configurable), and dynamically tracks the weight of each banner, if a banner is being weighed over a certain period of time. We had some help on our ad tracking system from a good friend of ours, Dominic Plouffe. He was the lead engineer on the old ColdFusion based FuseAds.
Next up was some new functionality that the sales folks required. We were requested to add in the ability to Geo-Target ads, which allows ads to be delivered to different geographic regions. To solve this, we used MaxMind for our geo-targeting needs, by accessing their COM object to deliver these ads.
At the same time that we wrote the new ad framework, we updated the admin interface to our ad software using ColdFusion. Yes, we still use ColdFusion here. ColdFusion's strength is in building form-based interfaces to data, and reporting on that data. Nothing that we've seen compares to ColdFusion in this aspect of web development. ColdFusion still runs the form based administration of the AnandTech website, and probably will for some time to come.
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overclockingoodness - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
msva124 (#3 and #4): Are you stupid or something? What's wrong with telling us about the back-end of AnandTech? I guess you would call it "kissing your own ass" when AnandTech gets exclusive products, months before they are released in the market. You read the whole article, didn't you? You knew what the article was going to be about? Why in the hell did you read it you moron?By the way, Jason didn't call himself an architect. He meant that he will have new functionality to build into the website (which also means architect). It seems like you dropped out of school a little bit early. Why don't you go ahead and get your diploma and once you are educated, you can come discuss things with us.
I can't believe where these trolls come from. Are you just jealous that you can't even dream about some of the stuff AnandTech has? It's okay, go cry to your mommy.
Seriously, awesome work Jason. And please do another article soon as we call as see msva124 die of jealousy.
michaelpatrick33 - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
Gee msva124 I didn't realize that website creator(s) weren't allowed to talk about their own process. I guess you don't believe in people having their own personal websites and sharing anything about their own websites either. Great info and great job Jason and please keep informing us of your "architect" process for we know you are using the English language in a symbolic manner to rightly show your pride in your accomplishmentsmsva124 - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
And I love the way you call yourself an "architect".msva124 - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
Thankfully, not many other websites dedicate so much time to kissing their own asses.Marlin1975 - Saturday, November 27, 2004 - link
I think its Opterons, Quad maybe?JustAnAverageGuy - Saturday, November 27, 2004 - link
Nice summary :)Might be worth mentioning what kind of hardware you had for the scalability test.