Case Study: Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia (DAFWA) boosts website capacity by 50% and improves response times by up to 70% with BlazeMeter

How DAFWA used load testing across their Gateway Website to increase the load capacity by 50%

The Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia (DAFWA), responsible for regional agriculture and food regulation, needed to verify and improve the performance of its internally hosted Gateway Website. Their goals were to identify peak-load limits for high‑usage areas, perform a health check to fine‑tune responsiveness within the existing architecture, and develop a targeted strategy to scale capacity for projected user growth.

DAFWA engaged Permeance, a BlazeMeter partner, to run 17 BlazeMeter performance tests over 18 days, ramping concurrent users and running a soak test to expose bottlenecks. Permeance recommended CPU increases, cache and database tuning, and image optimizations; after implementing changes, concurrent user capacity rose by 50% and response times improved by up to 70%, with additional network and caching strategies identified for future scaling.

DAFWA