"Richard F. Rebel" <rrebel (at) whenu.com> exclaimed:

• Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 15:10:31 -0500

• Traffic: 12Million per day

• URL: http://bidtxt.whenu.com/Search?templ=12%26kw=fitness%26num=3

  The two applications listed above are part of a suite of applications
  that provide bid text results to around 30 million client software
  installations around the globe.  Roughly 12 million dynamically
  generated pages are created daily and the volume is ever increasing.  We
  expect to increase to 50 million pages per day over the next 3 months.
  
  Bid text results are provided by third parties via HTTP.  For every
  impression, a connection to a remote HTTP server is initiated with query
  arguments derived from the initial request.  Results are returned in XML
  format and normalized to match our internal DTD.  The applications then
  perform selection based on various criteria, search and replacements. An
  XSL transform with a template is executed to create the resulting page
  which is then returned to the requesting client.  The entire process
  usually executes in less than .3 seconds per request.
  
  Due to the nature of the type of application and it's dependency on
  remote HTTP servers providing data, the wily nature of the internet, and
  the sheer volume of clients and requests, extensive use of timeouts and
  other protective measures is required.
  
  With the exception of the use of XML::Sablotron, the entire application
  is written in perl running in mod_perl2 which is running in Apache2 with
  the worker MPM.
  
  Mod_perl has proven to be reliable, fast, and easy to develop for, plus
  mod_perl also has an active and supportive user base.
  
  Interesting tidbits:
  
  Hardware: 5 Penguin Computing Relion 140, 2x2.8ghz Xeon, 2GB RAM
  OS: Linux 2.4 kernel
  Software:  Apache2+mod_perl2, XML::Sablotron (libsablot)
  Capacity:  2000 dyn pages per second (peak).