Case Study: City of Melville achieves 13x faster website performance with BlazeMeter

Government Website Service Significantly Faster than Before The City of Melville Improves Website Performance to Meet Citizens’ Demands

The City of Melville, a local government in Perth serving over 100,000 residents, relied on a multi‑tier public website (Joomla front end, Alfresco CMS, Apache reverse proxy) that became sluggish and unreliable during peak use, with page loads climbing from seconds to over two minutes. The challenge was to improve performance and availability without major re‑architecture, while still allowing content authors to preview updates immediately.

Permeance Technologies used CA BlazeMeter to diagnose scaling problems and deployed Varnish Cache as a web accelerator with tailored caching rules, a bypass hostname for author previews, and a grace period to serve content during backend outages, plus small optimisations in the delivery stack. The result: the site is about 13× faster, user satisfaction and service availability improved, content authors can publish and preview instantly, and the IT team can monitor and maintain performance without additional licence costs.

City of Melville