The Biophysical Society ("BPS") was founded in 1958 to lead the development and dissemination of knowledge in biophysics. It does so through its many programs, including its meetings, publications and committee outreach activities. The Society's members, now numbering more than 7,500, work in academia, industry and government agencies around the world.
One of the cornerstones of the Society's membership management, as well as operations related to Annual Events, is the public site available at https://biophysics.org. The availability of the system, especially during membership renewal periods or event registrations, is of vital importance as transactions are conducted through it.
BPS contacted Intelequia to review the current performance of the site to see what user load it could tolerate in a high traffic scenario, as some issues had occurred in the past. The solution is a site based on the Evoq Content version of DNN Platform, hosted on-premise and already using CloudFlare for CDN management.
After initial review through a series of load tests simulating double the traffic expected for the Annual Event, we observed that, even with improvements to some of the extensions installed on the site, it was very likely that we would need to increase the number of nodes serving the front end of the services to balance the load at peak times. However, with the infrastructure capacity in the local data center this increase was not feasible while deploying the suite of applications on a public cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure was the ideal solution.