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E3 Live Stream by Justin.tv Draws 1.6 Million Viewers

• callmeed 17y ago
  This is a totally honest question: How come Justin.tv can stream live video to 1.6 million viewers successfully but Twitter often has growth problems/outages when it comes to handling/routing 140-char messages? Am I comparing apples to oranges?
  • menloparkbum 17y ago
    You are comparing apples to oranges, but Justin.tv has way better programmers.
  • blhack 17y ago
    Justin.tv is a bandwidth problem. This is "easily" solvable using a CDN. Twitter is a database problem. I am not a DBA (but I play one at work!), but I believe this is "easily" solvable using sharding. As far as I know, twitter doesn't do this and nobody really knows why.
  • trezor 17y ago
    Like others have pointed out, justin.tv's main issue in cases like this would be serving the same data to lots of users, aka bandwidth, which can pretty easily solved. Twitter however has to fetch random data for million of different users, and hence simply throwing more bandwidth at it wont solve anything at all. It basically boils down to making a good and sane database-design which allows rapid updates and lookups for the core uses, and minimizing the load caused by non-core uses. That and using a database engine which doesn't fall apart when the dataset gets bigger than whatever amounts of RAM you can throw into your server. Evidently twitter could have made better choices on both those accounts.