

Twitter Woes Discussed By Someone With a Clue - tonystubblebine
http://laughingmeme.org/2008/05/28/twitter-or-architecture-will-not-save-you/

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tonystubblebine
Here's why I like this article. Unlike most commentators on Twitter's
problems, Kellan has 1) worked on systems that scale (flickr) 2) is technical
and 3) has inside knowledge. He doesn't mention Rails once.

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brandonkm
I thought it was odd Rails wasn't mentioned as well, as that has quite a bit
to do with twitters scalability issues.

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tonystubblebine
Actually, it's refreshing because despite what most commentators say, most
insiders I've talked to don't think Rails has anything to do with the
scalability issues. Rails just serves the web pages. If you give it the right
data it'll scale just fine. The problem is getting it the right data. You'll
notice right now that some features on the web are off and they're all because
they're intensive queries in the current architecture.

IM is disabled right now. That doesn't touch Rails in any way.

This isn't to say that Rails has been without problems. I'm sure they've had
to make many adjustments and probably dealt with some reliability problems.
But I can't think of and haven't heard of a convincing argument for why Rails
is the bottleneck to their scaling.

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jrnewton
_Honest to god hockey stick growth_

Can someone explain this?

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menloparkbum
<http://www.danablankenhorn.com/images/hockey_stick.jpg>

<http://www.jleung.com/main/system/files/images/hc-2006.GIF>

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mlinsey
This might be pedantic, but many people also incorrectly say "hockey stick"
when they mean exponential growth. Hockey stick growth would be more like a
sudden change between two very different rates of linear growth, which would
be equally traumatic for your start up in the short term but probably more
manageable in the long term.

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eru
Clue: Command Line User Environment? ;)

