
Can Twitter Be Saved? - ajbatac
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/can_twitter_be_saved.php
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paulhart
I submit that, given the team at Twitter is already working hard at resolving
their issues, they don't need much 'saving'.

There's been an awful lot of heat generated in the last few weeks about
Twitter, and not much light. In fact, most of the light has come from Twitter
themselves, and their newfound openness when communicating about their issues.

The fact that the media considers Twitter news-worthy, and the fact that there
are many copycat services available and in development, suggests that Twitter
is on to something. I hope that Pivotal is able to help them pursue their
discovery.

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fromedome
Agreed. Aside from the whining from self-important, so-called "A-list" types,
I think most users don't care about the growing pains and are just as happy to
have it working 90% of the time as 100%. This would be different if it were a
mission-critical government utility, but right now it's not.

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Hexstream
For the sake of argument, maybe it's not a "mission-critical government
utility" _because_ it's working 90% of the time instead of 100%.

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j2d2
Are the twitter guys explaining their solutions to problems anywhere? I recall
DHH saying scale is not an RoR issue, but twitter appears to have scaling
issues on RoR.

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mdasen
Scalling an application is easy. You just stick a load balancer in front of
more and more webheads. The hard part is scaling a database!

Twitter is still running a single master database system and - from what
they've put out - only three database servers. They might also have some
pretty, but wasteful queries that do a lot of joins. Joins are not good for
high-hit applications.

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j2d2
I thought this also wasn't hard by using horizontal partitioning..? Which, I
think, would have to map back into the application too.

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patrickg-zill
I have never used Twitter and most of the folks I know don't use Twitter
either.

Twitter could throw away everyone using the service now and still be able to
market to the millions not yet using Twitter.

