Case Study: 99designs
New Relic helps 99designs run at peak performance
99designs is a crowdsourcing marketplace for graphic design, where small business and individuals can post graphic design work that they need done. Founded in 2008 in Melbourne, Australia by Mark Harbottle and colleagues Lachlan Donald and Paul Annesley, the firm was started by designers for designers. 99designs connects passionate designers from around the globe with customers, mostly small businesses, seeking quality, affordable design services. The company provides a friendly, professional and secure environment where designers from all walks of life can find opportunity and compete on a level playing field — where they can show off their work, improve their skills, communicate with peers and win new clients. Over 60% of all design contests held online are run through 99designs, which has paid out more than $30 million to the design community in the last four years
Today the 99designs team is 50 strong and is spread equally across Melbourne and San Francisco offices.
Dev Ops Engineer, 99designs
Challenges
- Global 24X7 crowdsourcing graphic design site
- Hundreds of thousands of unique visitors monthly
- Tens of Millions page views monthly
- 40X more HTTP requests
- Delivery time for new features
Solution
- New Relic PHP monitoring agent for application layer
- Javascript RUM to monitor ‘real-world’ performance issues
- Performance insight into server, in-browser behavior
- Profiling information down to slow database queries
- New Relic easy to install, intuitive interface, and single consolidated view
Results
- Maintain and improve performance across the stack with New Relic at core of 99designs’ performance strategy
- Improved work prioritization, productivity, and performance problem resolution
- Gain new "ground truth" with New Relic's browser load time graph and "always-on monitoring" screen
- Saved weeks of time debugging performance issues
- See subtle performance changes at a glance for pro-active investigation and action
Environment
99designs has a multi-tier web stack, with a PHP application layer at its heart. The entire stack runs on the Amazon Web Services cloud. The company uses a lot of open source, and works to contribute regularly back to the open source community. Architecture Overview.
