Case Study: WhitePages achieves 15x reduction in servers and order-of-magnitude latency improvements with Akka

WhitePages Rebuilds Core Parts of Application Stack with Scala and Akka to Improve Scaling

WhitePages, a leading U.S. provider of contact information serving over 50 million monthly users and powering billions of searches annually, faced rising costs and scalability limits from a mixed service architecture built on Perl and Ruby. Critical services required dozens of servers (one grew to 80+ or another from 60 servers) to handle moderate throughput, suffered high latency from single-threaded processes, and spent excessive time serializing data, prompting a move to a reactive, event-driven stack to reduce hardware and operational overhead.

WhitePages rebuilt key components using Scala with the Akka runtime (and Spray), gaining an asynchronous, actor-based model that simplified concurrency and developer workflows. The switch delivered dramatic wins: a 15x reduction in server count for the heaviest services (one service dropped from 60 to 5 servers), up to two orders of magnitude improvement in 99th‑percentile latency on network-bound processes, much lower hardware costs, faster local development, and easier recruiting of higher‑caliber engineers.

WhitePages

Devin Ben-Hur

Senior Architect