Case Study: Fog Creek Software
Innovator Fog Creek Software improves performance of leading on-demand .NET web apps. Fog Creek Software is an independent privately owned software company located solely in New York City. Founded in 2000 by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, the company is built around the idea that great software developers will create great software if they work in an environment conducive to design and development. The firm is egalitarian, with a flat management structure and a minimal amount of management interference. Fog Creek has released 11 products since its inception and currently produces five – FogBugz, Kiln, Trello, WebPutty, and Copilot - all products to help developers and software firms build and run better software. The firm delivers products in the traditional enterprise on-premise license mode as well as some as cloud based. FogBugz and Kiln are available in both modes, and Trello, their newest product is strictly cloud-based.
"Having a tool that exposes performance bottlenecks and points you to the root cause is essential when you are a small team and need to ensure that you are not wasting precious developer resources."
Babak Ghahremanpour
General Manager – Fog Creek Software
General Manager – Fog Creek Software
Challenges
- Rapidly growing on-demand user base driving need for both historical and ongoing performance insight, diagnostics, and rapid repair.
- Improve and maintain high performance for both FogBugz and Kiln, both delivered on-demand
- Heartbeat (internal asynchronous task handler for FogBugz and Kiln) receives 200 Million/month
- FogBugz
- receives 40M requests/month
- API receives 120M requests/month
- receives 12,000 unique visitors/day
- Kiln
- receives 300M requests /month
Solution
- • After easy install process, FogBugz and Kiln teams started collecting performance data immediately
- Based on results, individual developers advocated for standardizing on New Relic
- New Relic used across the entire eCommerce ecosystem – database, server, front-end – in every phase from concept to post-release
Results
- Fog Creek Software has new proof, data, and insight into FogBugz and Kiln performance, monitoring performance across the stack
- Response time on the server side has been cut in half!
- Individual teams have the control and ownership needed for continued fast paced-expansion; they apply changes and measure the impact of those changes
- Ability to pinpoint performance bottlenecks as well as root cause helps maximize productivity of small team
Environment
.NET on Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2003, SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 R2, terminate SSL with Apache and load balance with HA Proxy, both running on FreeBSD. Three application servers handle front-end requests, three servers handle API requests, four handle batch processing tasks, and 10 database servers run MSSQL. Serve 2500 front-end requests per minute. They used co-located Dell hardware.
