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Being in that majority of people who haven't built Twitter-scale systems in the past, could someone explain to me why Twitter is moving to a new form of twitter
by jmcnevin 16y ago
Being in that majority of people who haven't built Twitter-scale systems in the past, could someone explain to me why Twitter is moving to a new form of twitter ID in the first place? What is wrong with their current system?
Also, it seems strange that they would include the new ID in string AND integer form in their JSON. I realize that they don't want to break existing javascript apps, but isn't there a significant bandwidth cost in adding that sort of kludge to the API when you're serving a quadrillion of these api requests every day?
- dangrossman 16y agoHow do you generate sequential IDs a quadrillion times a day if they're coming from 100 different computers? Lots of very fast coordination. In the new system, they don't have to coordinate every server just to make sure IDs are sequential. They just use the time stamp and some machine-specific information.