Case Study: Aurora Feint
Reducing application response time by ~75%. Aurora Feint is the creator of OpenFeint, the most successful mobile social gaming network, built for the Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems. "Aurora Feint: Arena Daemons" was the first Asynchronous Massive Multiplayer Online Game built from the ground up for the iPhone and gave birth to many of the features now found in OpenFeint. With over 30 million active users and 2,500 games, OpenFeint is now the standard social gaming solution for mobile devices.
"New Relic gets it right."
Chad Ingram
Server Engineer
Server Engineer
Challenges
- Manage the infrastructure for more than 2,500 mobile games
- 20–25K requests per minute on iPhone APIs, and growing
- Memory-intensive server instances overusing CPU
- Needed a way to see inside production apps to look at individual web and database transactions
Solution
- 24x7 monitoring of throughput, response time, and Apdex to keep pulse on performance
- Capacity analysis reporting to measure app performance against system usage
- SLA reporting for measuring and reporting the health of the business
Results
- Capacity analysis revealed memory usage issues resulting in server-restarts
- Transaction analysis enables rapid identification and remediation of bottlenecks
- Reduced overall application response time by ~75%
- Management team uses SLA reporting for measuring business performance
Environment
Rails, 10+ 8GB 4-core VPSs, large MySQL database servers, unicorn, workling, redis, memcached, nginx
