When MLB Advanced Media first started brainstorming on how to revamp the site, it got more bad news: The Cable & Wireless data center in Staten Island, N.Y., that housed the MLB.com servers was closing its doors. But it was a blessing in disguise, giving MLB a chance to rebuild the site architecture from scratch.
Besides rewriting the applications, MLB Enterprises merged its Web and dedicated application servers. The site, relocated to C&W's Weehawken, N.J., facility earlier this year, runs on Sun Microsystems Solaris servers.
Shaffer and his team installed two NetScaler 9800 content switches to distribute traffic among the Web servers. Although the appliances spread site content around the servers, the heavy volume of JSP-based dynamic content was still a problem. Recompiling those scripts every time its Gameday statistics application records a hit or error in a game nearly crashed the Web servers, Shaffer says, especially with the constant updates to the site's Liveline scoreboard.
"Our rate of change was so great that it became a downward spiral," he says. So Shaffer and the team mounted an NFS (Network File System) cluster on the Web servers to execute the JSP recompiles instead.
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