Case Study: Brick scales to 37 GB/day and cuts latency 43% with Linode

Brick - Customer Case Study

Brick is an open‑source web‑font service launched in 2014 by Alfred Xing to deliver full‑metadata, high‑quality fonts (rather than heavily compressed web fonts). Rapid popularity exposed limits of its shared hosting: Brick serves large files (20–700 KB), was handling hundreds of thousands of daily requests (peaking around 700K and ~37 GB/day), and needed high throughput, CPU power for on‑the‑fly CSS generation, a highly reliable network, and an affordable host.

Xing migrated Brick to Linode’s 40 Gbps SSD infrastructure with Intel E‑5 processors (Linode also sponsored the project), which absorbed traffic spikes and enabled growth without costly plan changes. Results included handling doubled traffic from a major customer, a 43% latency reduction (350 ms to <200 ms), a >7× drop in CSS generation time in a 100,000‑request benchmark (32.4 s to 4.4 s), and sustained scaling to its current traffic levels.

Brick

Alfred Xing

Founder, Brick