This community innovation has been accepted at the 2025 DHIS2 Annual Conference
Optimizing DHIS2 Tracker: Linux Migration Strategy
The USAID-funded Controlling HIV Epidemic for Key and Underserved Populations (CHEKUP) I project, implemented by CIDRZ in Zambia, targets Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW) across seven districts. Using DHIS2 Tracker Capture for patient-level data collection in the HIV prevention and treatment cascade, the program faced significant challenges in analytics performance due to the rapid growth of its database. By 2020, with nearly 2 million tracked entity instances (TEIs), analytics processes slowed dramatically. Rebuilding five years of data initially took six hours, but by 2022, this escalated to over 23 hours. These delays severely impacted data availability and decision-making for program teams. To address these bottlenecks, our team explored innovative solutions. After exhausting optimizations on the Windows-based server, we transitioned to a Linux-based environment in 2022 using dhis2_server_tools automated scripts. This strategic migration reduced analytics runtime for ten years of data from 23 hours to just one hour. These improvements enabled twice-daily analytics runs, providing near real-time data access and empowering teams to make informed decisions to better serve AGYW populations. This presentation will outline the challenges, migration process, and the impact of our intervention. Key takeaways for attendees include: 1. Best practices for DHIS2 server infrastructure management 2. The role of automation tools in enhancing performance 3. Strategies for scaling DHIS2 to meet the demands of large datasets Our experience highlights the critical role of innovative maintenance and administration in supporting timely, data-driven decision-making in public health systems, ensuring programs like CHEKUP I can respond effectively to the needs of Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW) in Zambia.
Primary Author: Joseph Muyunda Walusiku
Keywords:
DHIS2, Linux migration, analytics optimization, public health, AGYW, Zambia, CHEKUP I
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Thanks, Walusiku M, for sharing the experience using DHIS2 Server tools.
The tool comes with various optimisation configurations (at both the database and application levels) that improve the performance of your DHIS2 instances.
I agree and encourage use of the DHIS2 server tools when setting up your instances.
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