Case Study: AppNexus achieves high-throughput, cost-effective RTB load balancing with NGINX Plus

Appnexus Chooses Nginx Plus to Enhance Its Real-Time Bidding Platform

AppNexus, a leading programmatic advertising and real‑time bidding platform, needed to handle massive, latency‑sensitive RTB traffic—especially high‑volume, long‑lived SSP connections—while avoiding the cost and scaling limits of hardware load balancers. The company required a multithreaded, efficient software solution that could maintain availability during rolling upgrades and support rapid, global growth without hurting margins.

AppNexus deployed NGINX Plus on 12‑core Xeon Dell servers, automated with Chef/Puppet, to provide advanced load balancing, health checks, session persistence, and rich metrics. The change sustained roughly 75,000 transactions per second per instance, reduced costs versus F5 hardware, improved uptime so fewer ad impressions were lost, accelerated troubleshooting and tuning via detailed stats, and enabled new services and custom logic (Lua) for further business expansion.

AppNexus

Louise Mamakos

Senior Network Architect