World Famous Museum & Research Site Achieves High Performance For 4,000,000 Users

ABOUT CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

The California Academy of Sciences is a world-class science museum and research institution and one of the largest cultural attractions in San Francisco. The technology team handles projects ranging from the interactives on the museum floor, to the mobile apps, to the site. After a big redesign, the team needed to address performance.

THE SITUATION

The world famous museum and science research institution in San Francisco uses beautiful imagery on their site to sustain a heavy stream of traffic of 4 million visitors per year. Thousands of heavy images running on Drupal can slow things down a crawl. They needed load testing to optimize the site’s performance and improve user experience.

THE CHALLENGE

“When we load tested the site it was slow. Drupal sites are known to be heavy, but our site was really heavy. It wasn’t delivering the user experience we wanted.” The Academy opened a BlazeMeter account and started testing everything. They wanted a full picture of their site’s performance from every angle. After the launch the tech team moved to a new hosting environment. They did more testing before the move to validate that the configuration at the hosting facility could handle the site load and maintain performance.

THE SOLUTION

“BlazeMeter helped the team find the bottlenecks easily so we could fix them and improve performance.” Now BlazeMeter is a part of The Academy’s software development cycle. “We have to know the impact of every change made to the site. We use BlazeMeter before every release to make sure that our updates and new integrations don’t kill performance.”

THE RESULT

“Load testing on the BlazeMeter platform gave us the insights to confirm our predictions. They helped us make sure the site could handle our average traffic and peak traffic, so we’ve gotten better and better at predicting the impact our updates will have on the site. BlazeMeter helped us confidently ensure that the performance we predicted was actually true.” - Dana Lamb, PMO Manager, The California Academy of Sciences

START TESTING NOW

 

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