Frommer's MX

Frommers.com just underwent a site migration a few days ago. The transition was transparent to the user for the most part since the upgrades were all on the backend. The hardware and server software were modernized. The hardware specifications are top secret so that part will be omitted for this post. The server, which surfers can find out using browser plugins and scripting anyway was switched from Netscape iPlanet to Apache, which is more widely used. For development purposes, the 2 web servers are identical. No code needed to be changed. All scripts and programs were simply copied over and just worked. For security reasons, regular FTP & Telnet were disabled on the new system, so a few programs needed some tweaking.

The most difficult change was jumping several versions of ColdFusion, from 4.5 to MX7. That's 3 versions and 3 companies ago! Some of the old code was modernized, but most of it already worked for the most part. The difficulties all stemmed from server configuration. Several attempts over the past year were made to move to CFMX7. The server would work great and pass several stress tests (based on traffic stats), but would then fail in a set period of time when dipped into live traffic. It was determined that only the Verity K2 search component of ColdFusion was causing the problem, which was the main reason for switching to a hosted search solution last month. The upgraded Frommers.com has been up and running for 3 day now and seems faster than ever. So the long time problem has finally been solved!