

Twitter Search is Now 3x Faster - denysonique
http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/04/twitter-search-is-now-3x-faster_1656.html

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Tawheed
There are two ways to interpret this: OPTION A) Omg, I'm not going to use
Rails, even Twitter is ditching it. OPTION B) Hmm.. They built something
really fast using Rails, got it out there, got massive popularity, made
boatloads of $$ and now they're maturing and moving to a more robust
infrastructure.

I go with Option B. If you're a new startup -- don't confuse this advice and
start brewing your own Java-based server just because Twitter is doing this
now.

~~~
suking
Boatloads of $???

~~~
RobertKohr
AKA: Investors giving them money for worthless pieces of paper.

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samstokes
Submission title is misleading. The main Twitter website is still running
Rails and the article gives no indication that that will change. The article
is about the Twitter _Search_ frontend moving away from an architecture where
their application servers would synchronously query the search servers, which
wasn't scaling with their load.

~~~
denysonique
Actually you are right, I haven't read it carefully enough.

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tom_b
Anyone from Twitter who can comment on the cultural/engineering ramifications
of this?

I would be tremendously interested to hear from former Ruby hackers who have
been shifting (back?) to Java via the Netty tool mentioned in the OP.

Definitely a different tack that we are used to hearing hear on HN . . .

------
rwolf
Flagged.

Ignore the gauche of sending me a link to your service instead of the story
for a second--consider your audience! Why would a HN user who clicks on a link
to a story want to read your summary first?

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gry
If your system looks like it did the first day you launched, you're doing it
wrong. It's difficult to communicate to this...

Am I the only one who reads it is only removing RoR from the search stack? It
seems the rest of the front-end will probably exist as RoR in some form.

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PatrickTulskie
Maybe I'm reading between the lines here, but the feel of the article was "We
got this code base from Summize and it worked great when we got it but now
it's full of rot so we scraped it."

Twitter is big on the JVM and they have a bunch of Scala and Java engineers
over there so this seems like the natural path. Besides, a lot of the big
searching and map reduce frameworks out there are written in Java. This seems
like a very natural transition.

The annoying thing is you're going to find a bunch of people who skim the
article and start banging the "Rails can't scale" drum louder than they were 3
years ago.

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ChrisArchitect
there's not alot in here about dropping Rails particularly.... it's more some
Rails powered front end stuff for SEARCH that needed to be ditched to speed up
the crazy insane search load they get.

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bradly
This is article is only talking about search.twitter.com, isn't it?

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afsina
Expect them to drop RoR completely from Twitter soon. As far as I know they
only use it for some front-end stuff anyway.

