Moving from Monolithic to Distributed Architecture : Economical and Performance-related Impact on an e-Learning Platform

Abstract: When it comes to improving the scalability and performance of a web based application with an exponential growth of user numbers, a company has to face several crucial decisions in order to find the most efficient and economically most profitable system architecture. Those decisions also include the introduction of performance increasing methods and technologies. This thesis focuses on increasing the performance of an existing e-learning platform by analyzing and resolving weak-spots in the web server configuration. Subsequently, the initially monolithic system is transformed into a distributed and highly scalable architecture. As a last step, various database solutions have been found, tested, and compared in terms of their performance. Each modification is tested and measured by appropriate metrics. The outcome is a highly scalable system with a significant performance increase.