Flashes of Panic

It was the best of web apps, it was the worst of web apps…

No, never mind, I don’t have the mental RAM right now to do a complete Dickens spoof. Let’s just set the scene by saying that there was discussion with our co-publisher on our biggest title about doing an “e-book” version along the lines of this site. (In this case, “e-book” means “website with the same content;” we’re using it as shorthand for the more descriptive “interactive textbook.”)

Since this would be a significant site, relied upon by students across several time zones, minimizing downtime would be very important. So it was suggested that perhaps our co-publishers—being a New York publishing conglomerate with more than one employee in their IT department and, presumably, at least one of them within pager reach around the clock—should host the site.

Now, the demo site and the original “interactive textbook” are both running on our web server. Our web server is a bare-bones single-processor x86 box running Red Hat Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, the classic “LAMP” setup; our sole concession to high availability has been using software RAID to mirror two hard disks. Granted, the load on this box isn’t very high, but the server screams. It’s seriously fast. (And it’s been up for over a year.)

Their webserver, on the other hand, is some flavor of Windows, with IIS and MS-SQL. Every application on their webserver, bar none, is dog-slow. I could type authentication responses faster than their HTTP daemon. I don’t know why this is, since I presume they’ve got some hard-working geeks in there keeping it in tip-top shape, but that’s what it looks like.

I’m not a fan of deliberately putting a very interactive application on the slower of the available servers, but there’s more oversight on their boxes, so I diplomatically muted my suggestions that they learn LAMP and install a, uh, “high value” box like ours. And our developer was resigning himself to rewriting his PHP functions to work with MS-SQL rather than MySQL.

Earlier this week, they decided that perhaps it would be better if we hosted it. And they asked if we could do an “interactive textbook” for one of their other books, and if they could use our “e-commerce module” to sell it. I should point out here that our “e-commerce module” was largely developed in-house and involves at least one wetware step.

That’s not victory. That’s a rout. I did, however, refrain from dancing around my office chanting, “I told you so,” when I got the news.

Now playing: This Is It from Rock N Roll by Ryan Adams