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| Technical Information |
One of the goals of OSMusic.Net was to keep costs low. Paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for colocation was out of the question. Instead, OSMusic.Net is hosted on a box within my apartment. I pay a moderate fee to obtain a few IP addresses and a chunk of a T3 line that the complex offers. This is not a fractional T3, it is a full 45 megabits per second up and down, shared among the roughly 200 units in the complex. While this does stretch the bandwidth, by no means is it stretched thin. During peak usage times, the connection acts no worse than a T1, and overnight it is possible to utilize a significant percentage of the T3. I have peaked over 2 MB/s from a local Tucows server once, indicating I was on approximately half the line!
The connection is extremely stable, with a 99.79% uptime measured from August 2003 to April 2004. I have been confident enough in the connection to provide my good friend Kim Kraft with hosting for his projects, including Studio Kraft and the ever famous ModPlug Central, since the end of 2002.
While Kim operates his sites off of a separate Linux box, OSMusic.Net runs on a separate Windows 2003 box. It is running an Intel Pentium 4, 3 GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM. It has one standard EIDE hard drive, an 80 GB drive for the database and web sites, and an external 250 GB drive for the data files. OSMusic.Net is not alone, and runs many other sites, including The D3TL, Outpost Music, and of course my personal webpage. Not the greatest equipment in the world, but still a lot better than the 450 MHz 192 MB RAM laptop I was running in 2002! I do plan on eventually going to two full scale servers, one for the web sites and one solely for the database. However, that also will require upgrading my simple home network, which will take some time to acquire the parts for.
OSMusic.Net runs on standard IIS 6, using ASP as its scripting language, and Microsoft SQL Server as the back end database. OSMusic.Net is currently comprised of over 55,000 lines of combined ASP and SQL code. I chose NOT to go with ASP.Net for this site, simply because of the amount of effort involved just to do seemingly simple things. While I do see the power of ASP.Net in some areas, there were far too many problems I have run into with ASP.Net that I could find a solution for a lot easier in good old ASP.
A couple technical notes about some parts of the site, and some comparisons with Trax in Space:
- TiS only used one or two stored procedures, and a lot of uncompiled ad hoc SQL to do what was needed. OSMusic uses stored procedures exclusively.
- TiS's file upload program was written as a .DLL plug in to the web site, which did all the specific work, including adding the song to the database and other things not required by a general upload program. OSMusic has this all down to ASP code, with the upload portion separate from the database portion. This will make changes easier to digest, and not force me to reboot the system every time we need to change the upload script.
- That said, I do have a .DLL plug in that is specific to zipping and unzipping routines. However, it is a third party plug in (the only one used on the site), and will not change. The sections of the site that use this code include sample source files for songs and adding to collaborations.
- On TiS, error messages were always emailed to me. On OSMusic, if the system is capable of doing it, it saves the error to the database, and instead of giving the user a random reference number, the user will have a chance to enter comments about the error to save along with it, which I can review in a report at any time. Email is a last resort, and only done if the SQL server is down.
- On TiS, you had a login for your artist account, your reviewer account, your administration account, and your general user account. OSMusic has leaped lightyears ahead, and combined them into one account!
In summary, OSMusic was a chance for me to learn from the techincal mistakes of Trax in Space. I am the only programmer on this project, whereas Trax in Space had up to five people working on pages at any one time, and we quite frequently crossed wires, resulting in lost changes and other nasty things. Since I am alone in working on this project, things are naturally a lot smoother and more consistant, though it can take some time for me to finish things. In fact, it took several months of actual work for me to put this site together. Well worth the time to make a quality music site to more than fill in the gap left when Trax in Space shut down. I have enjoyed bringing together the many ideas I received in the development phase of this site and making the vision real. I hope you enjoy my work. |
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