Case Study: SoundCloud achieves high-performance scaling and rapid issue resolution with New Relic

SoundCloud Achieves High Performance, Exponential Growth with Help from New Relic

SoundCloud, founded in 2008, is a social sound platform that lets creators upload, share and discover audio. As usage exploded and the codebase grew with many developers, the company struggled to understand how code behaved in production: legacy Ruby features didn’t scale for high‑engagement profiles, performance issues were hard to pinpoint, and engineers often spent excessive time guessing at root causes.

SoundCloud implemented New Relic for real‑time application monitoring—using Transaction Traces, Performance Breakdown and Apdex—to quickly surface slow code paths, prioritize fixes, and drive alerting and KPIs. The result was dramatically faster diagnosis and remediation, measurable UX improvements for high‑traffic profiles, and New Relic becoming an integral part of developers’ deployment and monitoring workflow.

SoundCloud

Tobias Schmidt

Site Reliability Engineer