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Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the har

by taf2 4y ago

Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to follow … but it’s not like it was handling a complex UI or enterprise style hacks for a handful of worth it customers… Would be really interesting to see the code base for sure and definitely exciting to modify a code base handling so much traffic… not sure I can recall a fail whale in many years so maybe they did something right or maybe fearing the whale set the large organization into stone code fear Contrast that with Tesla and ever car is requesting data from Tesla servers and many many different complex interactions with much more complex engineering to accomplish a task and id imagine the Tesla engineering to be pretty impressive… but who knows it probably does not handle the same amount of read or write traffic…

x86x87 4y ago
Hahaha. No. They switched to the JVM eons ago. Also, you are severely underestimating how difficult it is to build and run something like twitter at scale.
ikiris 4y ago
"It's just a simple matter of programming"
- birken 4y ago
  Tesla has millions of cars in service and Twitter has millions of users. Same level of complexity!
jvm___ 4y ago
Twitter is just a ticket booth. Had over request, get tickets back. Except the ticket booth is in the middle of Times Square in New York and it needs to serve millions of people per second and be instantly accessible around the globe. The complexity is in the infrastructure, not in the complexity of what they're serving.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_vertigo 4y ago
I think you're massively underselling how complex it is to run something at scale. It's not a matter of just making the database go fast. Just using the database as an example (even though there's way more to it than just the database), you can scale a database a bit by sharding or running it as a cluster or what-have-you, but you can only shard so wide before you run into other problems which are much harder to solve. Running at a massive scale requires rearchitecting almost everything that came before.

by taf2 4y ago

x86x87 4y ago

Hahaha. No. They switched to the JVM eons ago. Also, you are severely underestimating how difficult it is to build and run something like twitter at scale.

ikiris 4y ago

"It's just a simple matter of programming"

birken 4y ago
Tesla has millions of cars in service and Twitter has millions of users. Same level of complexity!

jvm___ 4y ago

Twitter is just a ticket booth. Had over request, get tickets back. Except the ticket booth is in the middle of Times Square in New York and it needs to serve millions of people per second and be instantly accessible around the globe. The complexity is in the infrastructure, not in the complexity of what they're serving.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

_vertigo 4y ago

I think you're massively underselling how complex it is to run something at scale. It's not a matter of just making the database go fast. Just using the database as an example (even though there's way more to it than just the database), you can scale a database a bit by sharding or running it as a cluster or what-have-you, but you can only shard so wide before you run into other problems which are much harder to solve. Running at a massive scale requires rearchitecting almost everything that came before.