Early in my career, in the late 90s, I was at Cox Interactive Media on the team responsible for the web farm which hosted all of Cox Enterprises news sites: new

Early in my career, in the late 90s, I was at Cox Interactive Media on the team responsible for the web farm which hosted all of Cox Enterprises news sites: newspapers, radio stations, TV stations. This was before the days of SREs and SROs and dev-ops. We were just system admins and programmers and some of us could do both. The web farm was about two-dozen Sun Ultra 2s connected on a FDDI loop (we eventually upgraded to GigE), with content on NetApps (4GB drives). A couple Sun E450s. Apache[1] on the Ultra 2s. Apache + mod_perl on the E450s. Hosted at a Global Center DC in Sunnyvale (same DC that early Yahoo was hosted in). Monitoring with MRTG[2]. It's 1998. The Ken Starr report drops. Now, we knew it was coming, and we did our best to be prepared, but this is the late 90s. There was only so much load testing we could do and didn't really know how much traffic it would drive. We kept the site up, but it meant, as I recall, a lot of fine tuning of the mod_perl box and disabling interactive parts[3] of the site. I really wish I still had some of the traffic graphs. Fun times. [1] Receipt: https://github.com/apache/httpd/blob/1.3.x/src/CHANGES#L5754 https://github.com/apache/httpd/blob/1.3.x/src/CHANGES#L5754 [2] Receipt: https://github.com/oetiker/mrtg/blob/master/src/CHANGES#L3109 https://github.com/oetiker/mrtg/blob/master/src/CHANGES#L310... [3] The forums. OMG forum software was so terrible. I think we eventually wrote our own after nothing based on Netscape Application Server or that we found open source worked well at all.