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Before bring acquired, WhatsApp had what, 30 employees? How did they do it? I know they used custom BSD servers so that a single box could keep close to 1M TCP

Before bring acquired, WhatsApp had what, 30 employees? How did they do it? I know they used custom BSD servers so that a single box could keep close to 1M TCP connections open. I'm sure with a fixed target to aim for and all scope known upfront a small crack team of devs could do something similar for Twitter.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
The beauty of Erlang/OTP!
- evanweaver 8y ago
  Especially if you completely rewrite Mnesia.
zmb_ 8y ago
One-to-one vs. many-to-many messaging. The amount of work you need to do to deliver a WhatsApp message is constant and small -- just route the message to a single recipient's mailbox. The amount of work Twitter has to do to deliver a message grows as a function of followers. One celebrity tweeting another celebrity means you have to deliver the message to the mailboxes of the followers of both -- millions of times more work than WhatsApp per message. In addition, Twitter persists all the messages while WhatsApp doesn't.
- segmondy 8y ago
  This! Everyone keep's saying it's BSD Erlang and jumping on the Erlang train. Fine tools btw, but WhatsApp is super simple compared to Twitter. rolls eyes