Case Study: Code.org achieves massive scale—supporting 500,000 users per hour and 15 million users in one week with New Relic

Using New Relic, Code.org Aims to Bring Computer Science Instruction to Every Student

Code.org is a Seattle-based nonprofit founded in 2013 to make computer science available to every K–12 student; its introductory course is taught in 90,000 classrooms (about 4.2 million students) and the Hour of Code has reached tens of millions worldwide. A small engineering team had to scale a Ruby/Node.js platform to support massive, sudden traffic spikes during events like the Hour of Code while keeping costs and downtime to a minimum.

By rapidly deploying New Relic’s APM, Browser, Server and platform plug-ins and tuning database queries and caching on AWS, the team gained real-time visibility to optimize performance. The site supported peaks of 500,000 users per hour and 15 million users in one week, helped drive adoption to over 40 million students to date, reduced outages and freed engineers to focus on product development.

Code.org

Hadi Partovi

Co-Founder and CTO