Case Study: FamilySearch achieves $4.8M in savings and 10x scalability with AppDynamics

FamilySearch Saves $4.8 Million in 2 Years with AppDynamics

FamilySearch International, a non-profit sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the world’s largest genealogy organization, faced rapidly growing data — about 10 PB today and 300 million new records/images per year — that made their Oracle/Java search stack painfully slow. They needed to increase application capacity by 10x without multiplying infrastructure costs, because scaling hardware would have been prohibitively expensive.

After evaluating 20+ APM vendors, FamilySearch implemented AppDynamics, which auto-discovered their architecture with no code changes and delivered immediate root-cause visibility. The team boosted throughput from 11,500 to 122,000 transactions per minute, cut mean-time-to-recovery from days to minutes, and realized about $4.8 million in savings over two years (including roughly $3.5M in deferred hardware costs), achieving roughly a 10x ROI.

Family Search

Bob Hartley

Principal Engineer and Development Manager