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

When Tobias Schmidt joined SoundCloud in 2011, he was struck by the sheer size of the company’s code base. With 15 - 20 coders all developing different parts of the code base, it was extremely difficult for anyone, especially a new employee, to understand that much code and how it might behave in a production environment. Usage on the site was growing exponentially month over month, and Schmidt’s team was constantly pushing out new features to keep pace with user demand. In many cases, that meant creating code to meet an urgent need, then leaving it untouched for months or even years. SoundCloud’s early features worked perfectly well for a small number of users. But in many cases, those same features wouldn’t scale as users became more numerous and more active. All of those coding changes, often made under intense pressure and in response to increased demand, made it difficult for the SoundCloud team to identify which lines of code might be the cause of poor site performance. Prior to using New Relic, team members would often email each other to diagnose any given problem, relying on limited internal data to achieve a very slow, very incomplete picture of the issue at hand.

Launched in 2008 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud is a social sound platform that gives users unprecedented access to the world’s largest community of music and audio creators. Committed to ‘unmuting’ the web, SoundCloud allows everyone to discover original music and audio, connect with one another, and share their sounds with the world. Sound creators can use the platform to instantly record, upload and share sounds across the internet, as well as receive detailed stats and feedback from the SoundCloud community. The company has offices in Berlin, London, Sofia, and San Francisco and employs 180 people.