Building a high-traffic CMS with Java Spring Boot

When MMP asked us to replace their fragmented editorial workflow with a single CMS, the brief was simple but unforgiving: handle large editorial datasets and serve high-traffic public pages without sacrificing the editor experience. Here is how we got there.

Start with the traffic shape

A CMS tuned for editorial scale must be tuned for the traffic shape, not just the data shape. We profiled the existing pages, found the long-tail routes, and built the architecture around the request paths first - everything else followed from that.

• Apache fronts every request and serves static assets directly.
• Spring Boot handles editorial workflows behind a small REST surface.
• MySQL queries are hand-tuned, with indexes proven by EXPLAIN ANALYZE.

Caching where it matters

We picked exactly two caching layers: HTTP-level caching at Apache for fully rendered article pages, and an in-process cache for the editorial home page. Anything more would have introduced invalidation bugs we did not need.

@Cacheable(value = "homePage", key = "#section", unless = "#result == null")
public HomePageView load(String section) {
  return repo.findHomePageBySection(section);
}

What I would do differently

Next time I would ship the cache invalidation hooks earlier - we spent a sprint chasing stale pages after a CMS publish. Wiring the publish event to the cache eviction up front would have saved real time.