Q: What computer hardware and software drive the site?

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A: The site is hosted by University of Portsmouth Information Services, running on an 8-core Dell R510 server, with 32 Gb of RAM. If it sometimes seems slow, it is because it is busy, and because our statistical maps and graphs are generated by the system in response to user requests

The site "contains" many hundreds of thousands of pages, but they are all generated by a limited number of Java Server Pages (JSPs) running within an Apache Tomcat servlet container.

Charts are generated by a custom servlet using the JFreeChart Java library.

Most of our content is held in a Postgres database, with our historic boundaries held using the PostGIS extension.

Our collection of geo-referenced images of historic maps are managed quite separately using MapServer, an open source package created by the University of Minnesota. Our MapServer implementation the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Server standard. Historical maps are presented using two different viewers, Open Layers and IIP Image Viewer.

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