It’s one of your biggest fears. Its at once exhilarating and terrifying. Your app is performing well enough now, but will it handle the onslaught of hordes of new users?

Beyond basic performance monitoring and analytics, New Relic lets you see long-term scalability trends and helps you optimize for the future.

Optimize: Scalability Analysis

Our scalability analysis graphs are a great way to quickly see how scalable your app is, given the load it has experienced in the last day or last week. Go ahead and spin up your favorite load generator if you’d like to see how your app responds with significantly higher loads than normal, keeping in mind that robots never quite behave like real users do.

We’ll take a look at a long-time customer who’s team has done a great job optimizing their application for considerable throughput, which can grow exponentially on a regular basis.

First, their response time scalability analysis:



We’re seeing a throughput between 5k and 35k requests per minute, with a fairly consistent response time. As traffic grows 7X, the response time of this application grows only ~30% and stays within a very tolerable timeframe. If you’re wondering, the colored dots represent different times of day. Lighter colors for early morning, darker colors in the middle of the night.

Both the Database and CPU scalability analysis graphs are similarly flat. This application not only responds quite quickly, it responds very consistently throughout a typical day with fairly significant traffic.

Not every app is so lucky

This application has a more problematic response curve. As traffic grows 4X from 2k to 16k requests per minute, response time increases nearly 7X from 2.6ms to ~18ms within the database tier. Time to optimize. After all, scalability graphs are one of the few exceptions where you really don’t want to see a clear line up and to the right!

It’s never to early too scale!

Scalability Analysis gives you the big picture of how your app is scaling, and the best part is that it’s available 24/7 without any effort on your part. It’s just another great feature of New Relic available in our Gold plan. Enjoy!