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> And, if you remember in the early days, Twitter's scalability was absolutely atrocious - the "Fail Whale" was an emblem of Twitter's engineering headaches. T
by Twirrim 8y ago
> And, if you remember in the early days, Twitter's scalability was absolutely atrocious - the "Fail Whale" was an emblem of Twitter's engineering headaches.
That's because Twitter was:
1) A monolith
2) Written in Ruby
They started splitting components up in to specialised made-for-purpose components using Scala atop the JVM, and scaling ceased being a big issue. The problems they ran into couldn't be solved by horizontal scaling. There wasn't any service that AWS offers even today that would have helped with those engineering challenges.
- tomnipotent 8y agoIt had more to do with the consistency model of relational databases, though Ruby definitely didn't help.
- drchickensalad 8y agoYou honestly think that the main performance problem with a 2yo app is that it's a monolith?
- Twirrim 8y agoYes, based on their own detailed analysis and extensive technical blogs on the subject. Ruby was doing a lot of processing of the tweets contents etc. etc, and at the time Ruby was even worse for performance than it is today. (Ruby may be many things, but until the more recent JIT work, fast was not one of them).