3 ms·
Twitter didn't always use Snowflake -- that was introduced in November 2010. There was another, much simpler algorithm used before that which generated much sma
by duskwuff 4y ago
Twitter didn't always use Snowflake -- that was introduced in November 2010. There was another, much simpler algorithm used before that which generated much smaller IDs (e.g. under 3e10).
- liquidgecka 4y agoYea.. "auto increment" in mysql. it SUCKED in so many ways, primary of which was that it required a single mysql database to be the primary for all tweet writes. Every tweet just incremented a counter by 1. As we scaled up that server got overloaded rapidly and became a huge single point of failure. Snowflake was introduced to solve several problems at once. =)