4 ms·

Can Twitter Be Saved?

9 points by ajbatac 18y ago

paulhart 18y ago
I submit that, given the team at Twitter is already working hard at resolving their issues, they don't need much 'saving'. There's been an awful lot of heat generated in the last few weeks about Twitter, and not much light. In fact, most of the light has come from Twitter themselves, and their newfound openness when communicating about their issues. The fact that the media considers Twitter news-worthy, and the fact that there are many copycat services available and in development, suggests that Twitter is on to something. I hope that Pivotal is able to help them pursue their discovery.
fromedome 18y ago
Agreed. Aside from the whining from self-important, so-called "A-list" types, I think most users don't care about the growing pains and are just as happy to have it working 90% of the time as 100%. This would be different if it were a mission-critical government utility, but right now it's not.
- Hexstream 18y ago
  For the sake of argument, maybe it's not a "mission-critical government utility" because it's working 90% of the time instead of 100%.
j2d2 18y ago
Are the twitter guys explaining their solutions to problems anywhere? I recall DHH saying scale is not an RoR issue, but twitter appears to have scaling issues on RoR.
- mdasen 18y ago
  Scalling an application is easy. You just stick a load balancer in front of more and more webheads. The hard part is scaling a database! Twitter is still running a single master database system and - from what they've put out - only three database servers. They might also have some pretty, but wasteful queries that do a lot of joins. Joins are not good for high-hit applications.
  - j2d2 18y ago
    I thought this also wasn't hard by using horizontal partitioning..? Which, I think, would have to map back into the application too.
patrickg-zill 18y ago
I have never used Twitter and most of the folks I know don't use Twitter either. Twitter could throw away everyone using the service now and still be able to market to the millions not yet using Twitter.

9 points by ajbatac 18y ago

I submit that, given the team at Twitter is already working hard at resolving their issues, they don't need much 'saving'. There's been an awful lot of heat generated in the last few weeks about Twitter, and not much light. In fact, most of the light has come from Twitter themselves, and their newfound openness when communicating about their issues. The fact that the media considers Twitter news-worthy, and the fact that there are many copycat services available and in development, suggests that Twitter is on to something. I hope that Pivotal is able to help them pursue their discovery.

fromedome 18y ago

Agreed. Aside from the whining from self-important, so-called "A-list" types, I think most users don't care about the growing pains and are just as happy to have it working 90% of the time as 100%. This would be different if it were a mission-critical government utility, but right now it's not.

Hexstream 18y ago
For the sake of argument, maybe it's not a "mission-critical government utility" because it's working 90% of the time instead of 100%.

j2d2 18y ago

Are the twitter guys explaining their solutions to problems anywhere? I recall DHH saying scale is not an RoR issue, but twitter appears to have scaling issues on RoR.

mdasen 18y ago
Scalling an application is easy. You just stick a load balancer in front of more and more webheads. The hard part is scaling a database! Twitter is still running a single master database system and - from what they've put out - only three database servers. They might also have some pretty, but wasteful queries that do a lot of joins. Joins are not good for high-hit applications.
- j2d2 18y ago
  I thought this also wasn't hard by using horizontal partitioning..? Which, I think, would have to map back into the application too.

patrickg-zill 18y ago

I have never used Twitter and most of the folks I know don't use Twitter either. Twitter could throw away everyone using the service now and still be able to market to the millions not yet using Twitter.