Geoscience Australia Web Services Portal
Tile cache optimization and infrastructure scaling for Australia's national geospatial web services. Reduced map tile response times from 3.2s to 0.4s while maintaining 99.97% uptime across 18 months for researchers, emergency responders, and government agencies.
Client
Geoscience Australia
Key Results
Uptime over 18 months
Daily map tile requests
Tile response time
Government agencies served
The Challenge
Geoscience Australia's web services portal was hitting 3.2-second response times during peak demand — unacceptable for emergency response teams relying on real-time map data during natural disaster events. The tile cache system and ArcGIS Server infrastructure needed a complete overhaul to handle 12M+ daily requests reliably.
Key challenges included:
- 3.2-second average tile response during peak usage periods
- Cache hit ratio below 60% — most requests hitting the origin server
- Single ArcGIS Server instance with no horizontal scaling capacity
- No proactive monitoring — incidents discovered by end users, not alerts
- Six agencies with different access patterns and SLA expectations
Project Context
Geoscience Australia provides critical geospatial data to support decision-making across natural hazards, energy resources, groundwater, and more. The web services portal is essential infrastructure serving multiple stakeholders.
Multiple Stakeholders
Government, research, emergency services
National Coverage
Australia-wide geospatial data
Our Solution
Rebuilt the tile delivery pipeline to achieve 93% cache hit ratio (up from 58%), load-balanced across multiple ArcGIS Server instances, and established proactive monitoring that catches issues before users notice.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing
Distributed traffic across multiple ArcGIS Server instances via AWS ELB, eliminating the single-instance bottleneck that caused 3.2s response times during peak demand.
Tile Cache Optimization
Restructured tile cache generation workflows, pushing cache hit ratio from 58% to 93%. Average tile response dropped from 3.2s to 0.4s — an 87% improvement.
Esri JavaScript API Enhancement
Optimized Esri JavaScript API layer loading and tile request batching, reducing client-side rendering time by 35% on standard map views.
Comprehensive Monitoring
CloudWatch dashboards with real-time alerting detect performance degradation within 90 seconds — incidents are now resolved before most users notice.
Multi-agency Access
Role-based access controls for 6 agencies with different SLA tiers. Emergency services get priority routing; research teams get bulk-access endpoints.
Performance Benchmarking
Automated benchmarking suite runs hourly against 14 key endpoints, tracking p50/p95/p99 latency to catch regressions before they breach SLOs.
Project Impact
Operational Excellence
- 99.97% uptime over 18 months for mission-critical geospatial services
- Mean time to resolution dropped from 47 minutes to 18 minutes (62% reduction)
- Proactive alerting catches 89% of issues before any user reports them
- Deployment pipeline reduced release cycle from 2 weeks to 3 days
User Experience
- Tile response time: 3.2s to 0.4s (87% improvement) at the p95 level
- Peak-hour performance now matches off-peak — no more slowdowns during emergencies
- Cache hit ratio from 58% to 93%, reducing origin server load by 6x
- Research teams can now bulk-download datasets that previously timed out
Need a High-Performance Geospatial Portal?
From tile caching to real-time data delivery, I build spatial platforms that handle millions of requests. Let's talk about your infrastructure.
Start a Conversation