Duluth MN, Binoculars.com Cuts Costs and Increases Stability by Utilizing Open Source and Free Technologies
(ContentDesk) May 7, 2004 -- Binoculars.com has achieved triple digit percentage sales growth since 2001. This growth also brought heavy increase of traffic to their servers. Unfortunately this traffic stressed their system to the point of failure during the 2003 holiday season.
After the holidays, the top Binoculars.com priority was fixing the instabilities in their technology. The result of the focus of the entire tech staff was the creation of the technology they call: "Dynamically Generated HTML."Some web technology experts might view Binoculars.com's new method of serving plain text HTML as a step backwards.
However, the people at Binoculars.com feel the benefits are worth the funny looks they sometimes receive. A popular opinion in website technology is that cutting edge web sites are entirely dynamically driven. Dynamically driven websites query a database when a web page is requested which produces the content. Binoculars.com found their dynamic site was a problem for their database as the processing power necessary to manage the increasing traffic was enormous. Therefore the company took radical action.
First, the company severed the link to the database from their web server. Second, they switched to open source technology, more specifically, the Apache web server. "To say the least," says Joseph Warner, CIO "the results have been stunning." "One of our main problems at Christmas was our name brand SQL server consistently crashed." Warner continues, "With SQL down, our entire site was down." Not a good thing for a company that does 99% of their business on the Internet. The other issue Binoculars.com faced was slow processing of Active Server Pages for web content itself. Data from Veritest, an organization commissioned by Microsoft, suggests that static HTML running on Apache web server can serve over four times as many concurrent users as Dynamic pages running on Microsoft's IIS.
With a few tweaks of apache they are seeing over 10 times the serving ability.
Binoculars.com still uses an SQL database, but only to store data.
Then the company uses code to make the HTML web pages from this data. The HTML pages are finally pushed out to the web servers every five minutes. This keeps the servers up to date while keeping the strain off SQL.Previously, Binoculars.com's server pairs (one server for web pages and the other for the database) would max out at 20,000 visitors a day.
Now a single Apache server has hit traffic spikes of over 200,000 visitors.
Another benefit to the company's technology change is price. Last Christmas serving costs were running $2500 per month. Now the company has more servers and the ability to handle 90% more people in a day and the bill has dropped to $1000 per month. This has allowed the company to locate multiple servers throughout the United States.
The use of multiple servers creates redundancy and stability. If one server goes out, then pages are served from other locations.CEO Daniel Thralow says, "Our old system crashed at least twice a week. Now we have a structure in place that seems to rarely, if ever, go down. We have been running on this new system for a month and customer complaints of a slow or frozen site have gone to zero. We have also noticed an increase in new orders.
This has been such a period of positive change, that we brought in food and few cases of champagne for the entire staff to celebrate.".
Sony Delays PlayStation 3
Copyright 2006 Geoff Gannon
As a result of problems related to the mass production of a key component of its Blu-ray DVD player, Sony (SNE) will delay the European launch of its next generation video game console, the PlayStation 3 (PS3). Sony will also reduce the number of PS3 units immediately available in both the U.S. and Japan.
In the U.S., the PS3 will launch on November 17th, with approximately 400,000 consoles available for sale. The U.S. launch will come almost a week after the Japanese launch which will consist of merely 100,000 units.
Sony's PlayStation 3 is the successor to the PlayStation 2, the world's most popular (and as recently as July, the world's best selling) video game console.
The Number That Really Matters
The fact that there will only be 400,000 PS3 units available for sale in the United States on November 17th is totally unimportant.
The launch date itself is unimportant. What matters is...
Sony Delays PlayStation 3
Christmas > Sony Delays PlayStation 3
What Gift Can I Give A Bird Lover This Christmas?
Choosing gifts for any animal lovers can be quite a pleasure, as it is often a gift that is shared by the recipient with her animal friends or pets. This is especially so with bird lover gifts. People who really love birds tend to want them to enhance their gardens, to encourage real wild birds to visit time and again, or even stay for the breeding season.A gift for a bird lover can therefore be a gift of life, a promotion of nature around the home, visible from the windows or while tending the garden. Encouraging wild birds to their gardens is something that millions do in the northern hemisphere, especially in the winter when many wild birds suffer from food shortages.At Christmas, cards are commonly adorned by robins, their red breasts contrasting so vividly with the white snow. But that pretty picture can be deceiving, with the harshness of winter depriving the robin and other resident birds of the sustenance and warmth they need to survive until spring.
It is that threat...
What Gift Can I Give A Bird Lover This Christmas?
Christmas > What Gift Can I Give A Bird Lover This Christmas?
Black Gay Talk Show Returns for Second Season
(ContentDesk) December 25, 2005 -- Just in time for Kwanzaa still basking in the afterglow of Christmas, Americas first black gay, TV talk show returns for a second season on Thursday, Dec. 29 at 10
Eastern/7 pm Pacific. The show airs nationwide on the Dish Networks, The Healthy Living Channel 223 and also on select Time Warner cable outlets.The Herndon Davis Reports, http://herndondavis.com, is ground breaking in many ways.
The national talk show is completely black gay focused and provides continuously uplifting messages and representations of black gay life.The shows executive producer and host, Herndon Davis adds that the second season is filled with on location shoots where we travel the entire country interviewing black gay men and women from all walks of life in order to place a face and a voice to what it is like to be black, gay and proud! Several episodes for the second season will focus upon spotlighting...
Christmas > Black Gay Talk Show Returns for Second Season
A GREAT TIME FOR A HOLIDAY
Holidays are a blessing to some and others dread their arrival. Why do we have Holidays? Surely celebrating a big event like the Fourth of July or Christmas is definitely time to bring out the decorations and prepare meals fit for a king or queen. But does everyone feel the same - are there always smiles and anticipation? Holidays were created as a respite from our day to day workabout world. Even our founding fathers realized that pioneers and settlers needed that "time out". All through the generations, holidays have served as a means of bringing family, friends, neighbors, and assorted critters together to share a meal, watch a parade, listen to a band, and have fun.
But not all holidays are met with the same amount of enthusiasm. Many people do not relish the idea of gathering with friends or family and would prefer to just keep on working or doing whatever it is they do. This is fine for them, but for others this would eliminate a very vital part of our lives. People celebrate...
A GREAT TIME FOR A HOLIDAY
Christmas > A GREAT TIME FOR A HOLIDAY
Propecia? Rogaine? What have you heard about hair loss remedies?
If you've paid a visit to your doctor, in 99% of cases you'd agree that Propecia is the only hair loss remedy that they know about...Why is that, you ask?Well, its the most well-known hair loss drug around the world. And pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions to make sure that doctors know all about their drugs...See, chances are that your doctor knows next to nothing about hair loss (or its medical name, alopecia). So they'll probably write you a prescription for Propecia. In fact,...
Duluth MN, Binoculars.com Cuts Costs and Increases Stability by Utilizing Open Source and Free Technologies Christmas
Christmas > Propecia? Rogaine? What have you heard about hair loss remedies?