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For what it's worth, I don't think Twitter currently counts as a scaling success story either. Hence this in my post: "Twitter is still fighting an uphill batt

• moe 16y ago
  Well, as you've been outed as being involved with twitter first-hand, can you shed some light on the problems they are having? Or is that internal stuff, not to be talked about? I'm curious because I've worked with various messaging systems myself. And albeit never having pushed them to near twitter-scale, the principles of scaling those horizontally seem quite straightforward to me, unless complex routing comes into play. But I don't see complex routing at twitter. To be more precise: For all I know twitter could (should?) probably just append those tweets to one file per user and would scale beautifully from there. Auxiliary services like search are a different story, of course, but those don't need to trigger failwhales when they break... What wall do they keep hitting?
  • al3x 16y ago
    The complexities of scaling Twitter have been pretty thoroughly discussed elsewhere, both by Twitter staff and informed third parties. At this point in time, I don't really want to comment any further on what issues they may or may not be having. I haven't worked there in over a couple months, and I'll bet that big parts of the system have changed in that time. I'm no longer informed about what's under the hood at Twitter, and I also don't want to second-guess my former coworkers, who I'm sure are doing their best. Sorry!