Case Study
Languages: PHP
Frameworks: Zend
CanvasPop Cuts Application Response Time to Microseconds with Help from New Relic.
Since 2009, CanvasPop has delivered more than 280,000 high-quality, custom-made canvas photo prints to 100,000+ customers across North America. With an "obsessed" approach to customer service – backed by an extraordinary lifetime guarantee – the company matches every customer with a personal in-house designer to help ensure total satisfaction.
CanvasPop operates two facilities in North America. One is the company's headquarters in Ottawa, and the other is a 20,000-square-foot facility in Las Vegas built to support manufacturing and order fulfillment across the continent.
"New Relic alerted us to the Amazon outage before Amazon did. We were able to bring up another copy of our database, along with some application instances in AZs that weren't affected, and get back online. In fact, our infrastructure was back up and taking orders faster than portions of Foursquare, Pinterest, or Twitter."
– Patrick Leckey
Senior Developer and Lead Systems Architect, CanvasPop
Challenges
- Ensuring high performance at peak traffic times such as the holiday season'
- Holiday season triples avg pageviews – from 25K to 70K
- Media coverage drives traffic demand spikes as much as tenfold
- Ensuring backend application runs at peak performance for smooth manufacturing
- Scales as needed to meet demand
- Re-design site, migrating from ASP to PHP to meet growth demands
- Deliver re-designed website in compressed timeframe
Solution
- Deploy New Relic as part of this process – a fast and simple process
- Use Chef-specific recipe for PHP agent install
- Received actionable information within minutes
- Use NR to monitor and improve performance of legacy systems
- Deploy changes 3-4 times a day on average, thanks to New Relic
- Monitor both eCommerce frontend and manufacturing backend with NR
- Manage development, test, and production using NR singe integrated interface
- Anticipate production issues using thresholds and alerts
- Identify issues early in deployment process
Results
- CanvasPop's application performance both faster and more consistent
- Performance spikes and dips eliminated
- Thresholds and alerts allow CanvasPop to spot performance degradation prior to customer impact
- Longstanding issues identified, triaged and resolved using NR for significant compute resources savings
- Instant access to performance metrics enable proactive problem-solving
- Single unified solution boosts productivity; eliminates hunting for problems and need for multiple tools
- Application and infrastructure health visible at all times