Case Study: Penton Media Improves its Drupal Application Performance
Improve Drupal Application Performance with TraceView
When Penton Media wanted to improve its Drupal application performance, who did they turn to? The answer, TraceView. Read Penton’s success story below.
Penton Media Backgroud
Penton Media is the leading independent, business-to-business media company, creating and delivering vital content that moves markets. Penton is where professionals turn to gain the critical insight, expert analysis and relevant connections needed to compete and succeed. Through its custom web application, Penton Media delivers industry information to more than six million professionals.
How Much Hardware Is Needed?
Penton built a custom CMS platform using a Drupal multi-site install in a virtualized server environment. The virtual machines host Penton’s PHP, Python, Java and Ruby web applications. The Penton systems engineering team determined that each VM would have an 8-core processor with 10GB of RAM along with myriad of caching and database servers to host the custom CMS platform. Despite the large capacity of these VMs, Penton’s development team stated that these machines were not powerful enough to support the business.
To prove that the virtual machines had the capacity to handle the workload, the systems engineering team required a third-party validation of the servers. Penton required a solution that would provide an in-depth, detailed view into its web applications.
The Drupal Community to the Rescue
Penton turned to the Drupal community to find an Application Performance Management solution that would monitor server capacity and provide complete visibility into web application performance. Penton found that the Drupal community strongly recommended AppNeta’s TraceView APM solution.
Quick Installation and Immediate Results
In a few minutes, Penton was able to easily install TraceView and, upon reviewing the performance data, quickly realize how powerful TraceView really is.
“I pretty much fell in love with TraceView as soon as I got it installed and running. And, with the TraceView Drupal module, I have gained huge insight into our website’s traffic pattern and user types,” said Travis Crowder, Systems Engineer, Penton Media
With TraceView installed and monitoring the Penton Drupal application, the systems engineering team now gathers more complete data about site usage, hardware allocation and web page performance metrics. TraceView also provided Penton with performance data on memory utilization per page load, server CPU requirements and which of its pages were the slowest to load. Using TraceView, Penton was able to resolve application bottlenecks that allowed its Drupal application to scale well within its existing server infrastructure.
What Should I Do?
With TraceView, you’ll have app performance results that go way beyond averages. Follow a single web request starting at the end users browser, through the web server into the application layer and all the way down to the database – TraceView provides unmatched visibility into the full-stack of PHP, Python, Java or Ruby web applications. To improve the performance of your web application, try TraceView for free for 14 days!
