Case Study: University of Virginia achieves 50x increase in concurrent users for Founders Online with MarkLogic

Providing Scalability and Speed for a National Treasure

Founders Online, built by U.Va. Press for the U.S. National Archives, offers public, searchable access to over 150,000 documents from six American Founding Fathers. The original XML platform was designed to preserve print formatting, not high concurrent use, so performance degraded under load (supporting only ~100 simultaneous users), searches were repeatedly re-run, and the project had just 1.5 full-time-equivalent developers to address the problem.

By re-architecting on the MarkLogic platform—using native search, data mapping, aggregate queries and a prepopulated static search index—U.Va. Press avoided a ground-up rebuild and leveraged existing code. Two programmers rebuilt the system to deliver sub-second, Google-like search (a 90-page document response time dropped from 19 seconds to 1.86 ms) and scale to 5,000 concurrent users (50x), with average responses around 120 ms, meeting all performance goals.

University of Virginia

David Sewell

Editorial and Technical Manager