Case Study: Obama for America achieves 90% faster app performance with New Relic

Obama Campaign Improves App Performance by 90% with Help from New Relic

Obama for America (OFA) was the technology core of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election effort, raising about $670 million online and running more than 200 apps to mobilize voters and volunteers. The campaign faced extreme, unpredictable traffic spikes (e.g., ~$2M/hour after a speech and 4 GB/s after a major announcement) and needed centralized, real‑time visibility and agility rather than slow, outsourced IT processes.

OFA built a redundant services backend called Narwhal on AWS and adopted New Relic for monitoring, which immediately revealed performance bottlenecks (one quick fix cut 160 ms requests by 100 ms—an ~80% win in the first hour). Within days New Relic-guided optimizations improved response times across the board by about 90%, enabling resilient donations processing, rapid iteration, and successful handling of hundreds of terabytes and billions of requests.

Obama for America

Jason Kunesh

Director of User Experience