City of Abbotsford

Reducing server stress during major flooding crisis

The City of Abbotsford is a friendly, livable city home to over 150,000 people in the lower mainland of British Columbia. 

In December 2020, Upanup provided a comprehensive website redesign for the City, including ongoing support, maintenance, and hosting of the website. Then, in November 2021, Abbotsford was struck with terrible floods from the overflowing of the Nooksack River. These floods killed hundreds of thousands of livestock and affected countless people in the surrounding area, leading many to look to the website for important updates and safety bulletins. Upanup had to make sure the City's website remained stable during increased traffic, and ensure citizens were able to access information in this difficult time.

Visit Abbotsford.ca

Services Provided

  • Website Hosting
  • Website Support
  • Website Maintenance

The Challenge

The flooding affected ground transportation from the port of Vancouver and swamped thousands of square feet of farmland, leaving vast economic implications and becoming one of the largest disasters in British Columbian history. The incident became national news immediately and brought major attention to the City, increasing traffic on the website exponentially.
During and after the flooding, Abbotsford posted critical emergency alerts and news updates often multiple times a day. Each alert and news post generated traffic surges from around the country, stressing server resources - resources that work in the background to host important programs and systems. These traffic surges escalated the server usage into burst levels, which could overload and crash the site. With so much activity on the site, Upanup had to ease the server stress and ensure residents weren't stranded without information.
Local, provincial and national news outlets released articles with links to Abbotsford alerts and news posts. Often other outlets would link these news posts incorrectly which would generate 404 error messages on the website. Among other unnecessary server requests, these 404s drain valuable server resources and needed to be dealt with.

The Solution

With an office in British Columbia and a meaningful client relationship with Abbotsford, the 2021 flooding hit close to home for Upanup. Plus, with so many people affected, it was a top priority for Upanup to be there for Abbotsford to help wherever possible.
The primary goal was to keep the server responsive. In order to prepare for intense traffic surges, Upanup was constantly monitoring website activity from early morning to late at night. When a surge did hit, Upanup was able to reduce server stress by:
  • Identifying pages that news outlets had incorrectly linked and adding url redirects from those pages to the correct ones. This prevented taxing error messages (404s).
  • Fixing on-site broken links in news and alerts ahead of surges.
  • Fixing every application warning and error in the website logs. This reduced page request loading times and prevented landing pages (like the homepage) from writing information into logs, wasting valuable resources.
  • Ensuring the application and server caching was healthy, reducing the database demands by giving users a pregenerated version of each page without stressing the server with a more complicated page request.
Each time a news or alert update was made, Upanup was watching and making sure the associated alerts and news updates were cached accurately.

The Results

In conclusion, Upanup was able to ensure the Abbotsford remained functional throughout the disaster. By proactively monitoring server resource usage and responding with relieving tactics, we were able to keep server resource usage in the sustainable level as much as possible. Many team members worked early and late hours to respond to this situation, showing integrity and empathy throughout the problem-solving process.

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