Every year, Uppsala municipality arranges “Culture Night Uppsala”, which is Sweden’s largest cultural night, seen in the number of program points. From an operational perspective, the event is a challenge as the official website has a small load for 363, but days just before and during the event they get a lot of visits for two days, which places completely different demands on the operating solution.
Read more on Breakit: “The challenge: from 100 to 100 000 site visitors in just a couple of hours – without crashing” for a more overall description of the project, or continue here for more technical information.
The Culture Night moved the operation from Amazon AWS to Rackfish under 2017, and could then make an interesting comparison of how our platform stands in comparison. Clear result was that a lone Rackfish server delivered over 50% more performance, on average for the visitors, although the number of visits increased by 36%.
Server Configuration on Amazon AWS and Rackfish:
| Amazon Web Services
ELB – Elastic Load Balancer 5 servers for the site – EC3 m4.large (2vcpu, 8GB RAM) 1 server for database 7 servers in total Management of third part. |
Rackfish Standard server
1 Rackfish server (10 vcpu, 8GB RAM) High availability (high availability on the server with automatic restart at server error) Reduced from 7 to 1 server!
|
The numbers show a strong improvement in the experience for visitors when switching the operating supplier to Rackfish. These improvements we estimate in part to be a lower delay (latency) in the network, our fast virtualization from market leading VMware, and the specific difference that Rackfish reserves resources and has free capacity for downtime so it never gets “crowded on the server” because of “messy neighbors”.
The website for the cultural night of 2017 was mostly the same as last year, although changes, updates of versions can of course affect the performance improvement. The website is built on WordPress by Krokedil on behalf of Destination Uppsala AB, a municipal company that works, amongst other things, with project management of public events on behalf of Uppsala municipality.
Visitor statistics
The number of page views we delivered increased by 36.93% from 366,000 to around 500,000 during the campaign period, and all this was delivered by one single server at Rackfish, instead of load balancing and 6 servers in Amazon AWS.
Performance during the month, according to Google Analytics:
Average page load time: – 52.11% better with Rackfish vs AWS
Average redirection time: -71.73% better with Rackfish vs AWS
Average server connection time: 50.43% better with Rackfish vs AWS
Average server response time: -63.47% better with Rackfish vs AWS
Average time to load: -35.46% better with Rackfish vs AWS
Read more about The Culture Night
Read more about Destination Uppsala
Read more about The developers on Krokedil
