Case Study: Voxer achieves real-time message streaming and deep system visibility with Joyent SmartOS and DTrace

Voxer - Customer Case Study

Voxer, a popular mobile walkie-talkie and messaging app, suddenly grew its user base 10X in a month, overwhelming its Linux-based storage system and causing users to wait for message downloads instead of receiving live streams. CTO Matt Ranney needed deep visibility into disk and network I/O and better tooling for their Node.js back end, which lacked the low-level profiling and debugging features needed to find and fix performance bottlenecks at scale.

Ranney migrated Voxer from managed bare-metal Linux to Joyent Cloud’s SmartOS and used DTrace and Joyent Cloud Analytics to profile CPU, disk I/O, filesystem latency, network I/O, and Node.js functions in production with minimal overhead. The move exposed “hot” functions and resource drains, improved application performance and user experience, simplified debugging, and enabled more efficient VM utilization—reducing the need to buy additional machines and lowering costs.

Voxer

Matt Ranney

CTO, Voxer