SurveyGizmo Scales Up to Keep Pace with Thousands of New Customers

Thousands of new customers are flocking to SurveyGizmo every month and some of them are really big. Really, really big.

That’s fantastic and we are all very happy. Though, in order to handle the increased traffic from all the new users we decided to make some changes. Some big changes actually…

Last week we put the final pieces together for an entirely new network architecture. Designed for maximum scalability, reliability and availability (say that three times fast).

This new network was pummeled on Tuesday night (late) to find it’s weak spots and also to profile just how robust our service will be with these changes. The results were fantastic. Each of our distribution nodes can handle over 1.2 million survey responses per hour and absorb peak traffic well over.

Also we are changing the database model for survey data in the up coming weeks. This new data model speeds up all reporting and exporting, but still allows for unlimited responses and questions. This change paves the way for the advanced analytics and reporting features built into the upcoming Version 2. It’s completely backward compatible.

Rollout
Next week, the switch to the new architecture will occur with four nodes across the United States. This configuration is capable of 4-5 million surveys an hour with an average response time of just a fraction of a second. Plus, as our needs grow the network allows us to add and swap resources without any downtime.

Speaking of downtime, the new network will go through one final test before we switch over next week. But we don’t expect any downtime as we perform the switch over — we will blog about it to let everyone know when it is done!

Cheers,

Christian Vanek
CTO, SurveyGizmo

Share This: