Reuters discovers that NT works better
Building a high-performance Web site involves more than creating HTML pages and Active Server Pages (ASP) that meet your business requirements. To build a high-performance Web site, you must also address performance, cost, and reliability concerns. However, companies often don't have time to address these concerns because they are busy keeping up with a rapidly changing Internet.
Reality Online (a fully owned subsidiary of Reuters) was one company that went against the trend and addressed these concerns. A team of engineers at Reality Online had built the Reuters Web site (http://www.moneynet.com) and Web-based Reuters Investor product on UNIX using Netscape Web server software, server-side scripting language, and C-based Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs. Under this platform, the Web site and the Reuters Investor product received about 500,000 page views per month. The engineers migrated the Web site to NT using Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0, ASP, and the component object model (COM). The site now receives more than 10 million page views per month. This article highlights the problems that Reality Online encountered with Reuters' UNIX implementation and how the engineers at Reality Online addressed those problems using NT. (For more information on the implementation, see the sidebar, "Windows NT Magazine Interviews Nicholas DiLisi," on page 144.)
Reuters Investor Product
The Reuters Investor product lets other companies partner with Reuters to customize the appearance of Reuters' content and integrate Reuters market data into their Web sites using HTML pages. Reuters can use templates to customize these pages with the colors, fonts, and graphics that each partner site uses. The HTML pages support framed and frameless sites. A partner site can also use these pages to provide HTML fragments that the Reuters server can host to deliver content in a frameless Web site using existing templates for specific market data types.
Partner sites that want to display data in their own architecture can use Reuters' Data API. The Data API lets partner sites access Reuters' data servers via the Internet using an HTTP request. The first approach for integrating Reuters data lets a partner site begin using the Reuters content almost immediately through the use of HTML pages. The second approach lets the partner site migrate to the Data API for additional flexibility with the user interface.
The UNIX Days
When Reuters decided to provide information to partner sites on the Internet about 2 years ago, Reality Online was using a homegrown solution to connect Netscape Web servers with Oracle data servers, both running on the Sun Solaris platform. In 1992, Reality Online built a suite of content data servers on the UNIX platform consisting of custom applications and Oracle databases to deliver market data to its Reuters SmartInvestor desktop application. Investors used this application to track portfolios and investments via a modem connection to Reality Online's private network. Reality Online invested a lot of time and money in building the data servers; thus, connectivity between the existing data servers and the Web servers was important.
Reality Online used the Netscape Web servers to build the presentation layer for its moneynet Web site. The Web pages required a certain amount of flexibility, which made a server-side scripting language necessary. Initially, Reality Online used a homegrown scripting language. However, as the industry changed and companies released new products, maintaining and improving the homegrown language became costly. Thus, Reality Online migrated to MetaHTML, a first-generation commercial scripting product. However, like many first-generation scripting products, MetaHTML performed poorly as the number of hits to the Web site increased each month. This poor performance was the result of CGI programs using forks to initiate processes for each HTTP request the Web server received, and starting multiple processes is time-consuming.
Reality Online was also concerned about the Oracle data servers' connection to the legacy databases. To maximize server performance, Reality Online wrote C-based CGI programs and compiled the programs to the machine code level to communicate with the data servers via sockets.
Reuters used Oracle Web Server and Rogue Wave's database library to access the legacy databases. When a Web page displayed Reuters data with data from sources other than the database, the company used Rogue Wave's database library. When the Web page displayed only data from the Oracle database, the company used Oracle Web Server.
Reality Online used six Sun Microsystems SPARC 2 servers to run Netscape's Web server software. In this configuration, the Web servers averaged about 85 to 90 percent CPU utilization to deliver approximately 500,000 page views per month. Reality Online wanted to deliver millions of page views per month. However, the company would need to add six more SPARC 2 servers to deliver 1 million page views per month. For a scalable Web site, adding six more servers wasn't a cost-effective solution.
Other important concerns included the ability to make incremental changes to the Web content and the addition of new Web features to the Reuters Investor product. Under the UNIX implementation, releasing new templates and changing existing templates required days of preparation because users had to manually copy lists of files to each Web server. In addition, the sensitive nature of the Web site data didn't permit Reality Online to interrupt the Web site during normal trading hours. Therefore, engineers and systems administrators needed to release new content on the Web site during off-peak hours (i.e., at 3 a.m.).
Reuters examined several solutions to the problems of releasing and stag-ing Web pages. At the time, many tools didn't support revision control on the Web server files or a publishing system for releasing files to production. If Reality Online found a usable tool, the company typically had trouble integrating the new tool with the existing Web development tools, or discovered that the tool couldn't support the number of files the Web site contained.
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