Case Study: 140 Proof achieves lightning-fast (30ms) social ad serving with New Relic

140 Proof Serves Ads on Social Streams at Lightning Speed Using New Relic

140 Proof, founded in 2009, is a premium social advertising platform that builds persona-based Interest Graphs to serve targeted 140‑character ads natively inside social and mobile apps. Its core challenge was a classic real‑time big‑data problem: process massive public social data and continuously select and deliver the single most relevant ad in milliseconds across geo‑distributed servers, handling huge event-driven traffic spikes while keeping three mission‑critical applications (the Automatic Optimization “Gator,” the Ad Serving API, and Proof of Performance) highly available and fast.

After adopting New Relic in 2010 and embedding it into a continuous‑deployment Canary workflow, 140 Proof used real‑time APM, Transaction Traces, and Apdex monitoring to find slow queries, decouple work into delayed jobs, and enforce a 30‑ms response target. The result was a fourfold improvement in response time, the ability to deploy multiple times an hour with confidence, faster triage and optimization, lower operational overhead, and stronger engineering ownership of performance.

140 Proof

John Manoogian III

Co-Founder and CTO