Case Study: University of Helsinki achieves faster, more resilient Drupal performance with Varnish Software

The University of Helsinki uses Varnish Enterprise to secure speed, performance and redundancy

The University of Helsinki, Finland’s largest university with over 30,000 students and more than 40 million page loads a year on helsinki.fi, needed to ensure fast, reliable delivery of its Drupal-based public website. As traffic spikes (notably during online exams and the COVID-19 period) exposed Drupal’s limits, the IT team sought a caching and redundancy solution to keep content fast and available while simplifying upgrades and ongoing maintenance.

They implemented Varnish, then upgraded to Varnish Enterprise to gain advanced performance features, professional support, and High Availability for redundancy. The result was noticeably faster page loads, improved resilience under massive traffic spikes, and a robust failsafe for critical events—enabling the team to confidently plan a future migration to containerized backends with Varnish preserving speed and reliability.

University of Helsinki

Petteri Hemmilä

Information Systems Specialist, Centre for Information Technology