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New info on the Twitter back end and infrastructure

164 Points

An article has just been posted on the Twitter Inc. blog about the evolution of the Twitter architecture, infrastructure and technology.. For your convenience here is an exerpt ..

"...We hit some scaling stumbling blocks a few months back, but not because Ruby or Rails was working against us. Once Twitter reached a certain amount of traffic we were forced to rethink our architecture; you don't build a messaging system the same way you build a content management system. We set about developing custom solutions both inside and outside our Rails application. We also made good...

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Twitter Inc. Launches Twitter Mobile Version

53 Points

Twitter Inc. has launched a mobile version of their Twitter service. It presumably is meant for mobile devices to be able to access the twitter service directly through the web interface without any 3rd party client needed. We briefly checked it out and it looks to be a pared down version of Twitter formatted for mobile phones.  Here are some screenshots of the new service (taken from a Mac on Firefox 2). 

Twitter Mobile - Login screen 

 

Twitter Mobile - Logged in and sending messages

 

Twitter mobile is available at...

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Interview with one of the developers from Twitter

3 Points

Here is a nice interview with Alex Payne, one of the developers of Twitter. Josh Kenzer asks him five questions about the technology and also a couple of more general questions on Twitter the service. A worthy read, Check it out.

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Of course Twitter is going to scale!

192 Points

With the exponential growth of twitter in just a few months, there has been some talk that Twitter and Ruby on Rails may not be able to scale. There are some posts today that say that is not the case. Anyway, I am sure that the guys at Obvious and Twitter will FIND a way to make it scale. Every new user and page-view on their hockey-stick-like usage graphs is like cash in the bank. Ok, more like a loan or a promissary note maybe. The point is that they will find the technical solution and the cash to do it, whatever it takes. More users and popularity has got to be adding to their...

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Twitter, Ruby on Rails and Scaling - a debate

121 Points

The guys over at loud thinking post about a conversation that they had with some of the Twitter developers and the issues around scaling and using Ruby on Rails... Interesting for sure (if you are interested in Ruby or software development).

Interesting to note that at one point along the way, (can't be determined when from the post), they were getting 11,000 requests per second on 16 CPU cores with no caching. I wonder what it is now?