Lately Twitter has been cleaning house, raising money, doing interviews and actually talking to users. In a blog post last week they did a Q&A session, directly answering questions about Twitter’s architecture.
So I have a couple of questions, too, based on a couple of discussions I’ve had with people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture.
- Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?
- Do you really have a grand total of three physical database machines that are POWERING ALL OF TWITTER?
- Is it true that the only way you can keep Twitter alive is to have somebody sit there and watch it constantly, and then manually switch databases over and re-build when one of the slaves fail?
- Is that why most of your major outages can be traced to periods of time when former Chief Architect/server watcher Blaine Cook wasn’t there to sit and monitor the system?
- Given the record-beating outages Twitter saw in May after Cook was dismissed, is anyone there capable of keeping Twitter live?
- How long will it be until you are able to undo the damage Cook has caused to Twitter and the community?
Update: Twitter continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism. They respond to this post here, saying “We’re working on a better architecture.” Kind of takes the air out of the balloon when you can’t get them riled up.
Dammit, stop bashing on Blaine Cook already - get a life.
I’m really suprised that twitter answered those kind of questions ( although the answers are not really to the point ).
Every stupid Arrington post is on http://www.techmeme.com/
Gabe is so lame!
Saturday morning TechMeme didn’t have a single post from TechCrunch on its home page. Not on the top, not at the bottom.
I became concerned. Really concerned. Did Arrington get ill? What did he smoke Friday night? Too much coke at D6? Comscore showing TechCrunch bleeding. Will TechCrunch survive?
But now, finally, the old FOX News of the Internets is back in shape. 150 comments and counting. Reader engagement and emotions. Scoble and Winer and Iskold (of ReadWriteWeb) as guest stars. Pageviews peaking.
And Arrington’s cash register is ringing so loud that neighbors in Atherton have called police.
Another TechCrunch weekend…
I’m so glad that Dave Winer invented blogs for the whole world to get UK-style tabloids. All Arrington all the time.
BTWI just noticed that the Feedburner icon in this page’s header lists just 758k readers — severly down from > 900k just two weeks ago.
I guess we will get another 2 posts of similar quality still this weekend.
wow, It’s exciting and I saw your blog in technorati with 22000+. OMG
Are there any other startups in the world besides Twitter? I love hearing about all of the petty little problems every day. Maybe there is another startup that is having petty little problems too?
Maybe they are waiting for either Yahoo, Google or Microsoft to buy them out.
Don’t forget just how powerful the Twitter Brand name is with the global web community. Ditto these posts and other relevant blog moans.
Michael, with all due respect… Have you ever coded? Have you ever learned ANY programming language?
You used to be a lawyer, right? Then don’t pretend you know computer science.
please.
They’re focusing on this one for a reason, and I’m not sure why.
thats why twitter will be gone in 5 years, tops.
geez, its not that hard to scale..i can lay it out in 3 steps
1) load balanced web servers. takes about 2 minutes to configre
2) mysql cluster backend. Easy
3) get rid of hack job RoR, and switch to a real language
The end.
Re: TechCrunch update above, why (would one wish to) get companies (and also readers) riled up. It’s only a short term traffic and attention gain strategy if employed.
Technology screw-ups almost always cover management poor judgment. Here’s a post on that: http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=798
Hey Mike what happened to your RSS numbers? Couple weeks ago it was 945k now its down a couple 100k….Hope the Jain story and the Twitter link bait is helping.
@Arrington: Fuck you, you’ll write about what we tells ya, or your cigars are getting broke.
Lots of very interesting news here. It sounds like Twitter is in desperate need of an infrastructure architect. The capacity planning sounds like it has been an afterthought.
Ryan
lesson in brevity: http://www.mofata.com
Jealousy no twitter interview? Whats eating ya Mike? Little brisk with your readers and your losing subs way to go dude shake your money maker!
Arrington, in case I wasn’t clear–that wasn’t a rhetorical question.
HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY TO USE TWITTER?
And don’t say that is not the point, because it is absolutely the point. As even a law school drop out will tell you, you have no contractual obligation with Twitter to deliver you a certain level of service.
Clearly, with the amount of funding Twitter has, they would have experts in the field.
Or has the money gone somewhere else…?
How sad you have nothing more to write about since they responded smartly.
Time for more 1938 media posts!
Twitter - We serve millions with a desktop and a geek!
@Robert Scoble, I’ll do just that. Thanks!
Using three database servers is ridiculous. I was under the impression that they were doing a lot of difficult processing behind the scenes, and was willing to excuse their downtime based on that. I’ve written a few more thought’s on what this means for Twitter in my blog - http://joshduck.com/blog/2008/.....r-is-crud/
@174
Nobody cares about your stupid blog. At all.
You “new media” practitioners are a bunch of self-righteous freeloaders that don’t know anything about real technology but state yourselves as technologists.
Hey Mike,
Is it true that you recently changed your name from ‘Assington’?
A co-worker of mine posted the above as me, but to be fair I have been ranting about how stupid this post is and referring to you as ‘Michael Assington’, no harm no foul. Just thought I’d clear that up
Good luck with your new career in web application scalability.
RYAN, you nice book
I attended a talk on ’scaling Rails’ yesterday at RailsConf in which Blaine Cook participated. He admitted that scaling was an afterthought because “twitter was the stupidest idea ever” and that it wouldn’t have been built if scaling had been a requirement up front. Twitter was an app that was built for fun, and it’s success surprised everyone involved.
Interesting. They are overloaded many a times. They show some rubish and childish pictures when they are overloaded.
Talking with other people about Twitter may show your lack of Knowledge, at least they are doing something ! Why would they have to respond to anyone !It seems Geeks have an Ego that only Geeks Understand ! Take a lesson from Scoble he has tact and understands building a business ! As with all Starbuck’s Democrats you are a pain in the butt ! As with all Geek’s obviously you only communicate with machines , people skills you LACK !
All the Twitter team’s response did was highlight your poor judgement in singling out Blaine Cook. Until you apologise for that, I think you can safely be considered a unprofessional jerk.
All the Twitter team’s response did was highlight your poor judgement in singling out Blaine Cook. Until you apologise for that, I think you can safely be considered an unprofessional jerk.
All the Twitter team’s response did was highlight your poor judgement in singling out Blaine Cook. Until you apologise for that, I think you can safely be considered an unprofessional %$£@.
@LSF - an unprofessional ASSHOLE
Very hard questions to them.
@139.
Well said.
Does anyone think http:www://twitterfund.com will sign people up or raise any money?
Nice experiment on whether a fan community will actually pay a small amount to get something they’ve had for free. Sure beats ads, surely?
Twitter helps me a lot in website traffic … twitter is really good
_____________
John Glenn
There are a lot of sites out there showing book video. BookVideoTV, BookTelevision and of course CSPAN, but I like how BN.com and Reader’s Entertainment TV have specific genre channels and original shows. There’s just more to see and I can be specific in what genre I’m interested in. Anyone else watch online tv?
Twitter has been a help in the traffic world.
twitter never impressed me much, at least not on first impressions, perhaps i just haven’t found it to be all that much use yet
Cool news!