czestochowa.pl

Description:

The portal of the Częstochowa City Council offers a full spectrum of information related to the city and the region. It presents the latest news covering events in the city. It also contains a plethora of information for all residents, potential investors as well as tourists and pilgrims.

In 2007, Częstochowa won the prestigious "Złota@" contest in the "Local Government Leaders of Electronic Administration". The purpose of this contest was to identify and promote local governments that effectively contribute to the development of information society in Poland by running projects with the use of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT). One of the main criteria was the quality and content of the official Internet service of a local government unit - the frequency of updates, mechanisms used in the website and compliance with W3C standards.

The Challenge:

For many years, the portal has been regularly supplied with new content, and gained popularity over time. This situation caused it to slow down significantly - to the extent of preventing its operation during peak traffic hours. The challenge, we were faced with, was to upgrade both hardware and software of the portal. The requirements were: minimal service access interruption time, short response times even during peak traffic hours and optimization of the portal to reduce the amount of transferred data.

The Solution:

The portal was migrated from Plone 2.0.6 to version 3.0.6. In order to do that, a special migration script was developed, allowing the transfer of unchanged data between incompatible structures. All additional modules were updated to the latest stable versions.
Numerous performance tests were performed (with the use of JMeter), allowing determination of the optimal configuration of the environment.
Finally, a solution based on ZEO and FileSystemStorage was used. Nginx and Varnish were used as well.

The Technology:

Python, Plone, Zope, Varnish, ZEO, JMeter