Back in 2008, I guestimated the flow rates (in a spreadsheet lost thanks to google) and figured a single PC could handle all the tweets. Other machines would se

Back in 2008, I guestimated the flow rates (in a spreadsheet lost thanks to google) and figured a single PC could handle all the tweets. Other machines would see a streamed copy of the database, and handle showing the users their feeds. I think Paul is right. If you want a stream of short messages (text only, with a fixed number of BYTES length), it wouldn't be hard at all. Especially in a world full of gigabit ethernet networks and SSD storage.