Case Study: Airtable achieves 1-second faster page loads for all users with Lightstep

Airtable Proactively Improves Performance with Lightstep and Reduces Page Load Time by 1 Second for All Users

Airtable, the no-code platform used by creators and enterprises to build custom work systems, faced rapid growth that produced massive traffic increases and peak-load spikes, limiting visibility into end-user and system performance. To ensure fast page loads and rapid restoration when issues arose — including problems buried deep in their stack like database failures — Airtable turned to Lightstep’s observability platform for higher-fidelity monitoring and real-time insights.

Lightstep gave Airtable high-cardinality, real-time visibility across 100% of production traffic, letting engineers pinpoint serial work to parallelize and quickly confirm fixes. Using Lightstep, Airtable reduced overall page load time by about 1 second for all users, improved first-load time by 10% for 100% of users, and cut linked-record search p50 from ~1s to 10ms (99%) and p95 from 2.1s to 0.8s (62%), while improving incident response and confidence in scaling.

Airtable

Caleb Meredith

Product Engineer