Earthweb is a business and educational portal for the information technology industry. As a portal Earthweb provides IT Educational Content (hundreds of thousands of pages of reference, how-to, source code, and technical education documents), Career Opportunities (the largest tech job board on the internet and many training tools), Community (thousands of discussion forums on various technology topics), and Commerce (online stores and auction sites to buy and sell IT business and pedagogical products)

The Business Challenge

Earthweb had decided on Dynamo as their eLearning delivery platform. During development, Earthweb encountered challenges with the Dynamo start-up time - delays were lasting up to 1.5 hours. McFadyen Solutions was initially brought in to assist Earthweb with the stabilization of deployment and trouble-shooting of the Dynamo start-up issues. The business model of EarthWeb is based on content delivery (mainly IT Education articles). In a second stage of development, McFadyen Solutions continued working with Earthweb to review site code for optimization.

The Return on Investment

McFadyen Solutions delivered deployment stabilization very quickly. After a review of the existing system, McFadyen Solutions determined that the serialization of XML repositories containing approximately 44,000 files (all with attributes set to queryable) was causing the Dynamo start-up delay.

After success with the deployment stabilization, Earthweb chose McFadyen Solutions to manage a content management optimization performance project. McFadyen Solutions reviewed source code and made suggestions to optimize performance for the site in the future (debug statements using system.out. println, string concatenations using +, email sending logic not optimized, (JDK118 vs JDK 1.2). Software was installed to analyze JAVA memory usage and leaks. McFadyen Solutions also provided a document detailing the optimization procedure.