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Twitter always struck me as a little lower on the complexity scale and a little higher on the throughput scale than where RoR's sweet spot lies. Since their re
by frankus 19y ago
Twitter always struck me as a little lower on the complexity scale and a little higher on the throughput scale than where RoR's sweet spot lies.
Since their requirements seem like they're pretty static now, I would think writing a backend in C wouldn't be out of the question.
- icey 19y agoThe question is, do they have the skillset in-house for that sort of undertaking?
- kirubakaran 19y agoEven if they don't, how difficult will it be for them to bring in a great hacker who can?
- icey 19y agoI'm sure there are enough skilled C hackers out there; but for them to bring in a new face to re-architect the system now (which is to say, after all the scalability problems have started) seems risky.
- mattmaroon 19y agoFor them to not do so is riskier.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- systems 19y agoskillset is a really good word i am really surprised how facebook, so quikly found the skillset to build a 10,000 server site and how come, twitter didnt! just why ... its the skillset, but again why was facebook successful in aquiring the skillset when twitter wasnt! ... why is twitter considering a rewrite and facebook didnt ... they just grew !!
- axod 19y agoHaving 10,000 servers doesn't say 'skillful' to me.
- bluelu 19y agoFacebook's system is also 1000x times more complicated than twitter's simple message passing system!
- fendale 19y agoFor me, Facebook often seems very sluggish and slow - I have a pretty useful 4Meg connection and others sites are fine - maybe 10,000 servers is part of the problem - it seems like a ridiculously high number. I wonder how many transactions/pasge views per second they get ...
- alaskamiller 19y agoEmploying people with the skillset to build 10,000 servers and having the money to do so are two separate things.
- dcurtis 19y agoTwitter has millions of dollars.
- nostrademons 19y agoAccording to various scalability articles on FaceBook, they continually rewrite their software. It's probably been rewritten far more than Twitter has, you just never hear about it because TechCrunch doesn't have a source inside. In my experience, that's really the only way to do software. It's completely unrealistic to think you'll get it right the first time, and yet completely destructive to go and start from scratch. So you pick your worst problem, rewrite it, then hook it back into the working system without touching the rest. Then pick your next-worst problem, rewrite it, etc.
- humanlever 19y ago
- gojomo 19y agoThe bottleneck/stress-point is almost certainly the unique IO patterns and latency expectations. I doubt CPU is the issue or that C is necessary; instead they need to figure out the right fanning/batching algorithms, and buy gobs of RAM and use it efficiently. With their recent fundraising, they might even be able to run a couple parallel fixup projects in competition, and let the best win.