How Lincoln Loop sped up database performance 19x using Sentry Performance

About Lincoln Loop

Lincoln Loop helps organizations boost revenue and improve retention by fixing buggy, poor-performing Django sites. Sentry finds the problems, Lincoln Loop fixes them.

Lincoln Loop is a full-stack web agency that serves large publishing platforms with millions of daily views. As a full-stack web agency, they work closely with their clients, many of whom operate in the news industry.

Monitoring the performance of a live website in production

Lincoln Loop began to optimize website performance when they noticed some of their high-profile pages experiencing significant slowdowns. The team was already regularly monitoring performance using Sentry Performance and AWS CloudWatch metrics.

Recently, Lincoln Loop migrated their infrastructure from AWS EC2 instances to Fargate. This caused slower response times due to the higher computation demands, thus leading to a performance regression. With Sentry Performance, Lincoln Loop’s Senior Architect & Tech Lead Yann Malet was able to quickly pinpoint and fix the slowdown.

Yann first recognized that improving the performance of a live website compared to local testing created a new set of challenges, as production sites use multiple cache layers and handle numerous concurrent requests (while, in contrast, local development often tests one endpoint at a time with cache layers disabled).

So how did they go about solving their performance problem in production using Sentry?

Achieving 19x faster database response time with Sentry

Lincoln Loop’s strategy for performance optimization relied on production metrics and implementing one modification at a time. Once they established a baseline, they generally looked for degradations and deviations from usual performance patterns over the past 30 days.

In this example, Lincoln Loop first identified the URLs causing the most significant slowdowns by looking at the “User Misery” of different URL families in the transaction summary.

From there, they used tracing to confirm that the problem lied in their database. Having identified their problematic queries, Lincoln Loop introduced a few optimizations which resulted in a 19x faster database response time. Read more here on how they implemented the solution.

What’s Next for Lincoln Loop

At Lincoln Loop, Sentry.io is our go-to for fixing problems fast and diving deep into how our system performs. They rely on Sentry to swiftly handle any issues, keeping downtime low and enhancing user experience. By using Sentry’s extensive analytics for continuous performance monitoring and performance, Lincoln Loop can pinpoint and tackle potential bottlenecks, enhance application efficiency, and execute both preventive and corrective actions. Lincoln Loop’s commitment to immediate responsiveness coupled with strategic foresight enables them to keep their app reliable and running smoothly.