How many servers does forums.anandtech.com have?

[NokiaDude]

Hello Mods, I was just wondering what kind of servers forums.anandtech.com is running on and what OS's they use. Even though I'm not a subcriber (yet), I noticed that the forums have received a little more "pep", meaning lower page loading times. By the way, could you hook me up with statistical server usage? Like when the servers are hit the most?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

AFAIK they all run windows, as far as usage, at the main forums index you can see how many people are logged in at any given time, I'd say 6-9pm or so are the busiest. Just speculation though.

 

[wfbberzerker]

Originally posted by: NokiaDude
Hello Mods, I was just wondering what kind of servers forums.anandtech.com is running on and what OS's they use. Even though I'm not a subcriber (yet), I noticed that the forums have received a little more "pep", meaning lower page loading times. By the way, could you hook me up with statistical server usage? Like when the servers are hit the most?

i dont think they give out server stats, but i know its pretty darn huge.

 

[Angrymarshmello]

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1604&p=1

There are a couple other links on the first page to the other server upgrades - that was just the newest one I could find.

 

[Paulson]

I wish you could see server stats... that would be absolutely awesome...

 

[Jason Clark]

There are 3 servers running forums.anandtech.com for failover mostly as the forums can run off 2 without any issues. Forums lowest activity is around 6am then it just goes starts climbing to 12 noon and then is busy right until midnight. Then at 2-3am is starts to dip again to the 6am low period. At the peek time which is essentially 2pm to midnight we have from 3500 to 4200 unique users online.

In terms of which categories are the most busy here the order goes like this:

1. Hot Deals by a long shot
2. Off topic
3. For sale & Trade
4. The war and middle east.
5. General Hardware
6. CPU
7. Motherboards
8. Video
9. Cases & Cooling
10. Software Applications

Browser Usage:

MSIE 90%
Netscape 7%
Opera 3 %

Platforms

Windows by far the most popular 99% linux around 1%.

Hopefully those are some good tidbits for you.

 

[olds]

Thanks Zuni. That's some interesting info and should answer a lot of questions.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Browser Usage:

MSIE 90%
Netscape 7%
Opera 3 %

Is mozilla included in the 7% netscape? (and phoenix?)

And no one can really answer this - but I wonder how high the opera number really is; opera by default (IIRC anyways) uses an IE5 user agent string.

edit: also I believe opera on linux gives out an IE5/windows user agent string.. hmm.

 

[RossMAN]

Wow I knew that Hot Deals was popular but beating all the other categories.

Awesome

 

[Jason Clark]

Actually opera has opera in its browser string, and yep the netscape numbers include mozilla. IE rules around there thats for sure.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Zuni
Actually opera has opera in its browser string, and yep the netscape numbers include mozilla. IE rules around there thats for sure.

You can select which user agent string you want it to use - last I used it, it defaulted to IE5. It might be different now.

 

[Jason Clark]

According to our web logs (where browser string is permanently stored) they are all Opera in one form or another and that is the default, I have opera 7 installed and it is definitely opera in the string.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Zuni
According to our web logs (where browser string is permanently stored) they are all Opera in one form or another and that is the default, I have opera 7 installed and it is definitely opera in the string.

What do you mean they're all opera in one form or another? If it reported as IE5 you'd never know the difference. Although they may have changed the default nowadays, I think the last I used it was version 5.

Edit: just installed 6, and yep, it identifies as IE5 by default. screenshot

 

[Jason Clark]

I just tested a default install here with opera 7 and 6 and the user_agent string contains opera, therefore our stats software will pick it up as opera (I know as I wrote the stats software and specifically hunt for that word). While the string may contain MSIE compatible or Mozilla compatible the default Opera 6 and 7 installs DO have opera in the string, which is how our stats software knows its an opera browser. I agree that people can fudge user_agent strings, but for the most part (as most people have no idea how to do it) it's accurate.

Here are the user agents from the CGI variable scope for both browsers

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.03 [en]

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]


Note both contain the word opera. If you want to test it output USER_AGENT in your web scripting language of choice, it probably fudges IE in the middle of the user agent string but appends opera onto the end. That is what the windows installs do anywho.

P.S watcha writing in the background of the screenshot? MP3 player?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Zuni
I just tested a default install here with opera 7 and 6 and the user_agent string contains opera, therefore our stats software will pick it up as opera (I know as I wrote the stats software and specifically hunt for that word). While the string may contain MSIE compatible or Mozilla compatible the default Opera 6 and 7 installs DO have opera in the string, which is how our stats software knows its an opera browser. I agree that people can fudge user_agent strings, but for the most part (as most people have no idea how to do it) it's accurate.

Here are the user agents from the CGI variable scope for both browsers

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.03 [en]

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]


Note both contain the word opera. If you want to test it output USER_AGENT in your web scripting language of choice, it probably fudges IE in the middle of the user agent string but appends opera onto the end. That is what the windows installs do anywho.

Yup -

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Linux 2.4.20 i686) Opera 6.12 [en]

P.S watcha writing in the background of the screenshot? MP3 player?

Yeah it's the web frontend to a mp3 "daemon" of sorts. Not really a true daemon because it needs a controlling terminal, and communicates through a text file not sockets or anything like that, the web stuff just writes information to the text file, sends a hangup signal to the player, and the player reads the file and plays whatever songs/artists/etc based on that. Pretty rough right now but it does work.

 

[Jason Clark]

Cool, the new flash player is great for this kind of thing, and you can make it run standalone, even in the taskbar if required. With Flash Communication server you can also store all your mp3s on a remote server and make a player to stream them from there on demand.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Zuni
Cool, the new flash player is great for this kind of thing, and you can make it run standalone, even in the taskbar if required. With Flash Communication server you can also store all your mp3s on a remote server and make a player to stream them from there on demand.

Actually there's no streaming, the web stuff runs on the same machine as the player, I want to have a dedicated machine for music so that I don't have to turn music off when my main machine gets turned off for whatever reason. I also tend to only use things that I can use on the command line (when possible - hard to use mozilla or gimp on the command line ). So it'll have a web interface but I can also ssh in and control it. Flexibility is the idea, anyways

 

[NokiaDude]

Originally posted by: Zuni
There are 3 servers running forums.anandtech.com for failover mostly as the forums can run off 2 without any issues. Forums lowest activity is around 6am then it just goes starts climbing to 12 noon and then is busy right until midnight. Then at 2-3am is starts to dip again to the 6am low period. At the peek time which is essentially 2pm to midnight we have from 3500 to 4200 unique users online.

In terms of which categories are the most busy here the order goes like this:

1. Hot Deals by a long shot
2. Off topic
3. For sale & Trade
4. The war and middle east.
5. General Hardware
6. CPU
7. Motherboards
8. Video
9. Cases & Cooling
10. Software Applications

Browser Usage:

MSIE 90%
Netscape 7%
Opera 3 %

Platforms

Windows by far the most popular 99% linux around 1%.

Hopefully those are some good tidbits for you.

Thanks Zuni! Never knew that Hot Deals was so popular.