Optimization of evz.ro ('Evenimentul Zilei' on-line) for the traffic spikes generated by the elections of 2009 in Romania

Client: Publishing house Evenimentul and Capital

Yes: 2009

evz-logo

Description and solution:

3 months before the elections of 2009 it was forecasted that the traffic generated by the on-line issue of the daily newspaper Evenimentul Zilei will double to a significant traffic spike in the final round day. In the technical support agreement already available various changes were planned and implemented to increase the traffic absorption power. Therefore:

a) the database was relocated to a new server (in Distinct Datacenter) and the connection to the original datacenter was optimized

b) the capacity was raised at the web accelerators level

c) the related web services were relocated to other servers (the process also included the transition from physical machines to virtual machines)

An optimization and programming security agreement was executed additionally (cache headers, internal cache engine, reduction of SQL queries, authenticated users differentiation, etc)

In the election weekends the support output was improved due to the non-stop presence of a Distinct engineer ready for service.

The success of this project was measured by the obtainment of 99.803% application uptime (meaning only 170 seconds of 24h the website responded in more than 3s) in the day of the last round of elections.

Google Analytics data:


Date Visits Impressions
December 6th, 2009 (Sunday) 341,689 827,945
December 7th, 2009 (Monday) 701,329 1,774,991


The website evz.ro was the most steady news source about elections of the that day according to the impartial monitoring conducted by Distinct via publicmon.distinct.ro (see the methodology)

References: Dragos Dionisie, Bogdan Iacob


publicmon 6.12.2009
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