Case Study: CanvasPop achieves microsecond-level application response times with New Relic

CanvasPop Cuts Application Response Time to Microseconds with Help from New Relic

CanvasPop is an e-commerce company that has produced custom canvas photo prints for 100,000+ customers from facilities in Ottawa and Las Vegas. Rapid growth and unpredictable traffic spikes (holiday surges and media coverage) exposed scalability limits in a patchwork ASP environment and threatened the critical backend manufacturing workflow; meanwhile their existing monitoring only produced daily reports, leaving the team blind to real-time performance problems.

CanvasPop migrated to a PHP-based architecture and deployed New Relic during the rollout to gain real-time, system-wide visibility. New Relic’s RUM, transaction traces, App Map, slow-query logging and error reporting let engineers deploy several times a day with confidence, detect and avoid an AWS outage, and tune queries (one change cut a slow query from milliseconds to microseconds). The result was faster, more consistent application performance, fewer developer hours spent hunting issues, and improved operational readiness for expansion.

CanvasPop

Patrick Leckey

Senior Developer and Lead Systems Architect