Recently we were contacted by an educational software company that needed immediate help analyzing their website performance and implementing a quick fix. We really love this kind of challenge and agreed to take a look.

We focused on the slowest queries in New Relic and identified each could be sped up significantly by adding missing indexes. We also observed that the app’s database had been built with almost no indexes at all - so there's more room for improvement.

Paying attention to your database design and including the appropriate indexes can make a big difference in your app’s ability to grow and handle more users. In this particular case, some queries went from averaging up to 1 second execution time to consistently averaging less than 10 ms (ten thousandths of a second).

Here's what our client reported:

"New Relic shows significant improvement with database queries, perhaps 60-80% less time overall (see attached). I can feel it as an end-user. Much better performance, thank you!"