Case Study: Craigslist achieves scalable, flexible archiving of billions of records with MongoDB

Craigslist - Customer Case Study

Craigslist, the classifieds community serving 570 cities in 50 countries and handling about 1.5 million new ads daily, needed to archive and query billions of records in many formats. Its MySQL-based archive became a bottleneck: schema changes required costly migrations, archive-ready data piled up in production, and performance suffered, threatening growth and customer service.

In 2011 Craigslist migrated over two billion documents to MongoDB, using document storage, auto-sharding and built‑in high availability to scale horizontally on commodity hardware. MongoDB accommodated schema changes without costly migrations, removed the need for custom sharding code, and allowed an initial deployment designed for 5 billion documents (about 10 TB), simplifying operations and enabling continued growth.

Craigslist

Jeremy Zawodny

Lead Developer