×

Case Study

Quizlet Logo
View All Case Studies Get the Full Story
Languages: PHP, Node.js

Quizlet Case Study

Founded in 2005 by 15 year old Andrew Sutherland as a way to learn vocabulary for a high school French class, Quizlet, one of the world's most popular free education sites, attracts over 12 million unique visitors every month – more than doubling its user base every year for six consecutive years. With no predetermined curriculum, the company designs powerful, easy-to-use software that empowers students of all ages – from grade school to grad school – to pursue self-defined learning goals. The site offers more than 15 million study sets for users and hosts more than 1.2 million study sessions every day. In August 2012, the company released an enormously popular iPhone app, attracting more than 1 million downloads in a matter of months, making Quizlet the second-most popular free education app in the U.S. iPhone store.

"We're committed to using the best available technologies to help us grow and to give our users the best possible online experience. The Joyent cloud, optimized with New Relic monitoring, helps us operate with the kind of efficiency and flexibility we need to deliver an even better product to even more people" – Dave Margulius CEO, Quizlet

Challenges

  • Provide secure, reliable, fast site for more than 1.2 million study sessions each day – number steadily growing month over month
  • Ensure a reliable storage system for student work
  • Required a highly reliable cloud provider that easily scales, provides superior analytics
  • Rapid identification and resolution of performance issues across the Quizlet environment
  • Required near real time superior analytics for rapid diagnosis of performance issues

Solution

  • Joyent delivers highly reliable, cloud environment that easily scales to meet student demand
  • Joyent provides robust network monitoring tools and SmartMachines handle big traffic bursts
  • New Relic monitors performance across all web servers, quickly pinpointing source of any performance issue
  • DTrace and New Relic produce ultimate toolset for monitoring, isolating, and correcting performance issues
  • Toolset delivers near real time statistics, right down to individual CPU and memory
  • New Relic aggregates all available data for unparalleled visibility across the environment
  • Transaction Traces identify slow logs, query times, and help fix problems at deep granular level

Results

  • Joyent cloud and New Relic monitoring improves reliability, efficiency, high performance of learning tools for students across the globe
  • Quizlet has instant visibility into throughput, error rate, and app server response time for overall site health
  • Daily monitoring, visibility, management of Quizlet environment simplified
  • New Relic delivers proactive alerts when there is an issue
  • Quizlet improves productivity using New Relic analytics
  • Planning process significantly improved, including timing for updates
  • Quizlet now devotes more time to enhancing user experience rather than troubleshooting issues
Get the Full Story View All Case Studies

It's free, it's fast. Get the insights you need to improve your application's performance.

Create Free Account