Case Study: GiftCard.com achieves 25% seasonal compute cost savings with New Relic

GiftCard.com Saves 25 Percent in Seasonal Compute Costs with Help from New Relic

GiftCard.com, founded in 2004, is the largest online retailer focused solely on gift cards, running a service-oriented .NET environment on AWS. Rapid growth and heavy holiday traffic exposed serious performance issues—slow admin screens (average 8 seconds), intermittent multiminute checkout calls, and no easy way to monitor application-level behavior beyond basic server tools—making it hard to find and prioritize root causes before customers complained.

After deploying New Relic across public and internal machines in October 2012, the team used Real User Monitoring, transaction traces, App Map, Apdex alerts and API-level logging to pinpoint and fix problems quickly. CPU utilization fell from about 80% to 60%, avoiding roughly 25% in additional compute costs; admin screen load times dropped from 8s to 1s; problematic checkout calls went from minutes to ~60ms; overall checkout time improved ~35%, and the company moved to proactive, faster incident resolution.

GiftCard.com

Brian Winfield

CTO and Co-Founder