There was a great blog post diving into the JSON/caching issues specifically: http://perf.fail/post/97144331419/learning-from-apples-livestream-perf-fiasco http

There was a great blog post diving into the JSON/caching issues specifically: http://perf.fail/post/97144331419/learning-from-apples-livestream-perf-fiasco http://perf.fail/post/97144331419/learning-from-apples-lives... To clarify, clients were polling every 10 seconds for an _entire_ JSON file containing all the tweets at the bottom, instead of just requesting new tweets in the last 10 seconds and appending them. They also set a 10 second TTL on images, which seems... odd. They should be static.