The Problem

Each week nearly 300,000 people in the Baltimore Maryland area count on WBAL radio and WBAL.com for news and information. During key news events, traffic would spike from hundreds to thousands of pageviews per minute. WBAL needed a trusted partner to manage their online infrastructure so their visitors can get the news fast and reliably, especially during times of need.

The Solution

Atlantic BT carefully analyzed the existing infrastructure as well as weeks worth of log files to understand daily traffic patterns and unusual event traffic. The team’s analysis revealed that large amounts of traffic could be offloaded to an elastic cloud-infrastructure. This cloud infrastructure not only scales well during peak demand but also reduces the cost of bandwidth for commodity data delivery. In order to make the delivery seamless to WBAL’s visitors, Atlantic BT’s hosting engineers setup a caching proxy that reduces redundant calls to the primary application server from several times per second, per object to only several times per hour.

The end result: Complete transparency to the end user with increased performance to WBAL.

The final step in optimizing WBAL.com’s infrastructure was to analyze breaking news traffic. During these news events 90% of the site’s traffic is concentrated on a few pages of content.Our engineers created a customized application proxy that stores the web pages for 15-30 seconds.

This reduces the load on the primary application server to less than 10% of its original load. Once the application proxy server was deployed, instead of having to handle hundreds of dynamic pages per second, the front end application server only serves a fresh page every 20 seconds. Since the application proxy is serving up cached, “static” content without relying on a database and the need to render new content it can easily scale as traffic spikes occur.

The end result: Full manageability by WBAL with the ability to scale dynamically to handle the biggest news stories with ease.