Case Study: Zoosk achieves reduced Mean Time to Flirt (MTTF) and increased user engagement with New Relic

Dating Site Zoosk Relies on New Relic to Reduce MTTF (‘Mean Time to Flirt’)

Zoosk, a dating site with about 35 million visible members and a Behavioral Matchmaking™ engine, needed to keep user interactions fast and reliable—especially during peak times like Valentine’s Day. The company’s primary challenge was minimizing Mean Time to Flirt (MTTF) and ensuring that dozens of simultaneous A/B tests and backend changes didn’t unintentionally slow server response times and degrade engagement.

Zoosk uses New Relic APM to monitor every key metric, with dashboards that track server-side response and the time to inline JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and to surface performance impacts from tests or network changes. Combined with its Mission Control test-distribution system, New Relic helped Zoosk identify and fix latency sources; faster response times correlated with higher message and interaction rates, while slowdowns produced measurable drops in engagement—helping Zoosk keep MTTF low and user activity high.

Zoosk

Brian Backhaus

Vice President of Engineering Applications