Birkbeck College
fry's hosting experts make Birkbeck University's websites 700% faster
The challenge
Over the past five years, Birkbeck College has standardised on the Plone Content Management System for all their corporate and internal websites.
During 2008 and 2009, the sites were suffering from increasingly poor performance problems and this was impacting both on the experience of external users and the day-to-day operations of staff.
The solution
fry was engaged to carry out a detailed review of all the current hardware and software configurations. We also set up clones of the production environment on which we performed load tests and profiling. We found that the poor performance was due to multiple factors, including the poor performance of Python on SPARC hardware, and a software deployment that failed to take advantage of caching or available CPU resources.
Our findings were written up in a full report and on the back of this, we were commissioned to carry out our recommendations. These included deploying the software to a fully virtualised environment, and training staff in maintaining the new setup.
The result
Brikbeck's websites have seen a 700% improvement in performance across the board.
The new virtualised infrastructure enables the University to take full advantage of available hardware, and offers opportunities for better availability and business continuity. We have provided documentation of best practices, allowing Birkbeck to continue to take advantage of the new setup into the future, without reliance on fry.
