Case Study: Opera achieves millisecond latency and lower TCO while syncing tens of millions of browsers with ScyllaDB

Opera Syncs Tens of Millions of Browsers with Scylla and Achieves Huge Latency Improvements

Opera, the browser company behind products like Opera Mini and the "My Flow" sync feature, was running Apache Cassandra but suffered frequent process kills, long Java GC debugging sessions and persistently high latencies. At the Cassandra Summit they discovered ScyllaDB — a Cassandra-compatible, high-performance database — and chose it as a replacement to address stability and latency problems.

Opera migrated users gradually to ScyllaDB (testing backends in parallel) and reduced infrastructure from 30 Cassandra nodes to 21 ScyllaDB nodes while replicating 33 TB across two data centers. ScyllaDB delivered ~3x higher throughput and dramatic latency improvements: 99th-percentile read latency fell from 5000 ms to 4 ms and 99th-percentile write latency from 500 ms to 4 ms, cutting TCO and freeing on-call engineers from constant firefighting.

Opera

Rafał Furmański

Head of Web Services