C U S T O M E R P R O F I L E
Quizlet Success Story
At a Glance
INDUSTRY
Online Education
LOCATION
San Francisco, CA
USE CASE
Scale to meet increasing demand while diagnosing performance issues in near real time.
WHY JOYENT
Flexible cloud-based solutions built on premium hardware and coupled with superior network analytics.
WHY NEW RELIC
Comprehensive visibility into emerging issues across an increasingly complex code base.
URL www.quizlet.com
With its user base growing at an exponential rate, Quizlet is under extraordinary pressure to keep pace with growing demand.
“Over the past 12 months, we’ve welcomed 70 million visitors,” says CEO Dave Margulius. “Over the next 12, we expect
150 million. Many of those users are in grade school, high school, or college — an audience especially impatient with slow website performance. They just expect the site to work and work fast.”
Faster page loads aren’t the only concern for Quizlet. Data reliability is a major consideration as well, with users painstakingly uploading huge amounts of data every hour. “From the user’s perspective, a significant portion of our reputation rests on storing and protecting their hard work,” says Dave. “A reliable storage system that’s available all the time, with no unplanned outages, is an absolute necessity for us.”
The Quizlet team knew that it needed a first rate cloud provider that could scale quickly and easily to meet user demand. And in order to keep the site running optimally, the company needed superior analytics for quick diagnosis of performance issues in near real time.
“Before I joined the Quizlet team, I worked for other mission critical websites that had the performance and stability issues you’d expect from any large site,” says Ryan Gordon, DevOps and Backend
Engineer at Quizlet. “In those environments, we often didn’t know that something was wrong until a user emailed us. And even then, we wouldn’t immediately know the source of the problem. Was it the network? Was it the code? Our troubleshooting process would always begin as a guessing game. I’m so glad that Quizlet takes a different approach.” www.joyent.com
One Embarcadero Center, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94111 phone (415) 400-0600
Quizlet has no pre-determined curriculum; instead, 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.
Supported by ads, Quizlet offers its vast library of content at no charge to students and teachers. In August 2012, the company released an enormously popular iPhone app, which attracted 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.

C U S T O M E R P R O F I L E
Quizlet Success Story
Quizlet has no pre-determined curriculum; instead, 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.
Supported by ads, Quizlet offers its vast library of content at no charge to students and teachers. In August 2012, the company released an enormously popular iPhone app, which attracted 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 optimizes its cloud environment by turning to a combination of first rate vendors: a reliable cloud provider that can provide up to the minute data on performance issues across the network and application monitoring software that can pinpoint the source of any problem within
Quizlet’s increasingly complex code base. “It’s not just a matter of having the right cloud environment,” says Ryan. “You also need the right tools to keep your environment running at its best.”
When Quizlet began looking for a cloud solution that would scale quickly and easily to meet demand — all while providing 100% uptime for users
— Joyent was the easy and obvious choice. “The functionality we get from Joyent’s SmartMachines gives us a totally robust, reliable cloud environment that can handle big bursts in traffic,” says Ryan. “It’s so easy to boot up our cloud servers, then resize them when we need to. We’re also working with Joyent to establish a virtual LAN so that we can increase security, communicate between multiple servers, and rely on instant failover in the event of an outage.”
With Joyent cloud services deployed on a robust ZFS layer, Quizlet had access to a powerful suite of network monitoring tools. But in order to achieve comprehensive visibility across all aspects of its environment, the company also needed an application monitoring solution that would diagnose problems at the code level. That’s where New Relic came in.
“The combination of DTrace and New Relic is the ultimate toolset for quickly identifying, isolating and correcting performance issues,” says
Ryan. “We try to keep our response time below 150 milliseconds from all of our servers. And with these tools at our disposal, we can get near real time statistics, right down to individual CPU and memory. That’s hugely important in supporting some of the more challenging aspects of Quizlet, like the audio processing required for our text-to-speech feature.”
The Quizlet team relies on New Relic to monitor performance across all web servers, taking a deeper dive whenever intensive troubleshooting becomes necessary. New Relic even sends proactive email alerts anytime the Quizlet environment crosses an unacceptable threshold.
“New Relic aggregates all of the available data for us, which gives us visibility that we simply didn’t have before,” says Ryan. “The system taps us on the shoulder when something demands our attention. And when we need to take a closer look, we use Transaction Traces to identify slow logs, dig into query times, and fix problems at a really precise, granular level.” www.joyent.com
One Embarcadero Center, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94111 phone (415) 400-0600

C U S T O M E R P R O F I L E
Quizlet Success Story
Popular education learning site relies on
New relic APM and Joyent Cloud to meet the learning needs for students of all ages around the world.
The combination of DTrace and New
Relic is the ultimate toolset for quickly identifying, isolating, and correcting performance issues. We try to keep our response time below
150 milliseconds from all of our servers. And with these tools at our disposal, we can get near real time statistics, right down to individual
CPU and memory.
Ryan Gordon
DevOps and Backend Engineer
“I don’t know how I’d do my job without these analytic tools,” says
Ryan. “I use them every single day. When I log into New Relic, the first thing I see is the throughput, then the error rate, then the app server’s response time. All three of those are crucial for assessing the overall health of the site. And we use that throughput data to plan the implementation of heavy duty database changes, because we want to make sure that any adjustment will impact a relatively small number of users.”
With that level of visibility, the Quizlet team is in a far better position to manage its world class Joyent environment more proactively and productively. “These days, it’s unusual for users to catch a network issue or coding issue before we do,” says Ryan. “And because we can diagnose those issues more quickly than ever, we can put far less energy into troubleshooting and far more energy into strategic tasks that enhance the Quizlet experience for our users.”
“We have a big vision for this company,” adds CEO Dave Margulius.
“We’re building a global Internet brand. Quizlet is here to create learning tools that every student on earth can use, no matter where they live and no matter how affluent they may be. And 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.” www.joyent.com
One Embarcadero Center, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94111 phone (415) 400-0600

C U S T O M E R P R O F I L E
Quizlet Success Story
Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering enterprises and developers the best public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure for today’s web and mobile applications. Joyent delivers public cloud services to some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Quizlet, Voxer, and
Modcloth, and licenses the software that runs its public cloud to enterprises wishing to operate their own private or hybrid clouds. For more information, visit http://www.joyent.com/
new relic, Inc. is the all-in-one web application performance management provider for the cloud and the data center. Its SaaS solution, which combines real user monitoring, application monitoring, and availability monitoring in a single solution built from the ground up, changes the way developers and operations teams manage web application performance in real time. More than 30,000 organizations use New Relic to optimize over 58 billion daily metrics captured. For more information http://www.newrelic.com/ www.joyent.com
One Embarcadero Center, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94111 phone (415) 400-0600