Case Study: Apex Learning achieves 25,000 concurrent-user scalability and high availability with Alachisoft NCache

NCache helps Apex Learning mitigate Session Loss

Apex Learning, a leading provider of digital curriculum for secondary education, was struggling with reliability, scalability and high availability as its ASP.NET StateServer-based architecture relied on sticky sessions. With peaks of about 25,000 concurrent users and session state tied to individual web servers, load was uneven, maintenance required lengthy windows, and the platform could not scale by adding nodes. To address this, Apex Learning selected Alachisoft’s NCache distributed caching product.

Alachisoft’s NCache moved session state to replicated caching servers, eliminating sticky sessions and making application servers stateless so maintenance can occur during business hours without service disruption. The deployment produced true load balancing (even session distribution across eight servers), linear scalability (adding nodes proportionally increases capacity), preserved session state during server take-downs, and supported a full Disaster Recovery site in Atlanta — enabling Apex Learning to reliably serve tens of thousands of concurrent users.

Apex Learning

Rohit Agarwal

Lead Software Engineer