Solving a huge site's downtime - Parapolitika.gr case study

Recently the maintainers of the big Greek news site Parapolitika, the guys from the Greek subsidiary of Tatchit contacted us asking for our help: the site was going down routinely for some reason after going live (it was rewritten on Orchard from the legacy engine). The Orchard application was sometimes using up all of the server's CPU (despite it being a 24-core beast) and crashing the IIS worker process in the end. This needed some urgent fix because websites tend to be only worthy if they're alive...

We immediately jumped into the task of getting the site stable! Neither the Orchard logs, neither the Windows Event Log revealed anything interesting. However soon we could experience the phenomena live: the worker process was eating up memory until at around 3,8GB while the CPU started spinning like mad and finally the process died. The Event Log told that ImageResizer.NET was running out of memory. Seriously? There are 32GBs of it, damn it!

The culprit was the worker process running on 32b, thus not able to use the whole huge memory. While such big memory usage is not something Orchard does everyday (a vanilla Orchard instance in a 32b worker process uses about 80MB) this solved the immediate issue quickly. Together with some other tweaks to the server config the site was now running stable, quickly reaching new uptime records (although the previous uptimes weren't too hard to beat).

In the newly gained peace we finally upgraded the site to Orchard 1.7.1 from 1.6 (the new version doesn't only give many features but also performs a way better). Meanwhile we also fixed an issue that could cause OutputCache to serve expired content.

To quote Sotirios Roussos, CEO of urbanIT whom we worked with closely on this emergency:

"After making some not demanding sites using Orchard, we decided to use it as CMS for creating the new parapolitika.gr, a really huge news site with more than 100.000 visitors daily and over 20 editors and a lot of content. It was a challenge for us and Orchard as well. Unfortunately, the first days were tough. Sudden breakdowns of site were appeared and the pressure was high. Orchard seemed to have limits, or maybe not? That's why we asked help for Lombiq, due to their experience into Orchard infrastructure. Fortunately, they did respond quick and spent hours and nights with us. Until we reach our goal. A stable and quick site.

And, we did it. Thanx Lombiq! Keep up the good work!"

It was a rush but we're really glad that we see a happy ending to this story!

zoltan.lehoczky Orchard Case study Emergency Prapolitika.gr

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The European Accessibility Act came into effect today. Should you care?

With the European Accessibility Act coming effect into today (June 28th, 2025), we've reached an important milestone in (web) accessibility. As the official announcement states:

"The Act mandates that a range of products and services such as consumer electronics (TVs, smartphones, computers, gaming consoles, etc.), ticketing and vending machines, websites and mobile acts, among others, comply with accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities."

An important clarification here is that the EEA "applies to businesses operating in key sectors such as banking, transport, telecommunications, e-commerce, and consumer electronics [...] for new products and services introduced after 2025."

Now, you might think that "OK, but my service has been running for years and I know my customers, do I really need to worry about this?". Of course, you should! New products/services launching under the effect of the EEA have a competitive advantage of catering to a wider audience, including those not directly affected, but caring about (or taking care of) those who are.

Since Lombiq is a web software/services agency, we'll focus on one particular aspect of accessibility: web content accessibility. We started rewriting all our websites 2 years ago and web content accessibility has been a guiding principle of our UI/UX design from the very beginning (you can also check our case studies). We can't really put any metrics behind its usefulness and we didn't care about the ROI; our open-source DNA compelled us to do so to make sure that the knowledge we share is as widely available as possible.

But: Making your website accessible is not a one-off effort - you also need to make sure that your website remains compliant. Fortunately, neither did we or you have to start from scratch with all this: Compliance with EEA is covered by compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA (at the time of writing this article) and there are a multitudes of tools to help you in this effort.

That's why we developed a component of our UI Testing Toolbox library to easily integrate automated UI tests into any ASP.NET Core application that allows you to verify WCAG-compliance. Check out our sample UI test - it really is this simple! We continuously run such tests in our own CI workflows, as well as in our clients' projects.
Let us help you help us all!

Happy complying and compiling!

Migrating the homepage of the Orchard Core SaaS DotNest to Orchard Core
Following the migration of lombiq.com, Git-hg Mirror, Hastlayer, and Orchard Dojo from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core (and also the redesign of lombiq.com and Orchard Dojo), we had only one site remaining that was still running on Orchard 1: DotNest.com. While you could create Orchard Core sites on DotNest for years, until now, the DotNest website itself still ran on Orchard 1.This marks the end of an era. Now all of our sites are running on Orchard Core, which offers better performance, modularity, and development experience than Orchard 1.Furthermore, we fixed some web accessibility problems on the site and added UI tests to make sure nothing breaks and affects you as a user.We utilized many of our open-source modules, including Lombiq Privacy, Lombiq Helpful Extensions, and utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions. For the themes, we built upon the Lombiq Base Theme. Lombiq Helpful Extensions played a crucial role in this project (and in the other ones too), as there was a significant amount of content to migrate. Leveraging the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature, we transferred Orchard 1 content items—such as blog posts, pages, and even users—to Orchard Core. Additionally, we retained the search functionality on the Knowledge Base page, now powered by Elasticsearch and the commenting on blog posts with Giscus. Of course, while working with these modules we always make sure that any enhancement that comes to mind is added to them and any bug that we find is patched. So, the wider Orchard Core community benefits from each of these projects too.This is a migration, where if you notice nothing it’s great because we migrated a lot of backend code and the goal was to keep the functionalities of DotNest, without breaking or changing anything.Migrating to Orchard Core not only brought performance increases but also added quality of life and security features, like two-factor authentication. The new foundation of the site opened new possibilities for us to bring you a better version of DotNest.With DotNest now running on Orchard Core, we’ve completed our journey of modernizing all our sites. This migration wasn’t just about keeping up with technology—it was about ensuring a smoother, more secure, and future-proof experience for our users. Although most of the changes were behind the scenes, the result is a faster, more reliable DotNest that preserves all the features you rely on while setting the stage for future enhancements.Are you still running Orchard 1 apps? Contact us to see how we can help you migrate it to Orchard Core too.