Comments on: Twitter: What are you doing? Nothing. Because Your Service Is Down.

By: Kay Smoljak

Kay Smoljak — Sat, 31 May 2008 09:10:52 +0000

I hope that Twitter gets sorted out because I really love it.

Here’s an interesting discussion of the real underlying problem with Twitter – and no it’s not ROR:
http://myles.eftos.id.au/blog/2008/05/27/a-stark-realisation/

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:15:47 +0000

@dc – the Tech Crunch article was very interesting! It will be interesting to see if they do work the issues out, or if they get worse – will people continue to cling to the sinking ship?

By: Brian Swartzfager

Brian Swartzfager — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:58:48 +0000

It is strange that Pownce hasn’t caught on. It may be simply that Twitter got there first and it’s hard to displace the incumbent technology, especially when you’ve got some many popular figures in the tech world using Twitter and talking about it (sometimes ad nauseum) on podcasts like “This Week in Tech”.

One of the panelists on that podcast made the point that changing the programming language behind Twitter may not matter much, that the bigger issue is handling all of the constant database reads and writes that Twitter must be doing to facilitate the service.

By: dc

dc — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:58:33 +0000

Quite a good read over at techcrunch with regards to Twitter uptime:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/22/twitter-may-not-have-to-care-about-uptime-any-longer/

By: zac spitzer

zac spitzer — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:08:10 +0000

I never really understood why twitter stayed with RoR, all up it’s relatively simple system with a hell of a lot of users.

My normal rule of thumb is to simply or eliminate heavy layers to increase system capacity / performance /stability..

RoR looks like one of those, i have oft read people saying that most RoR developers can’t / don’t understand the code in the framework and that only a few people in the that community do

By: Rey Bango

Rey Bango — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:44:45 +0000

I think Brian said it perfectly and I believe most users have resolved to just learn to deal w/ Twitter being inconsistent. What I’ve found odd is how Pownce, which provides similar capabilities to Twitter, has never caught on, in spite of all of the Twitter issues.

By: Keith Peters

Keith Peters — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:27:48 +0000

It sucks that it goes down so often, but it’s not like I rely on it for anything serious. It’s such a great service overall, I take the downtime in stride.

By: jcyr

jcyr — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:21:51 +0000

It seems twitter is down every other day. Sometimes for very short periods, but hours at a time others. They have already given their main developer the boot, and hired new teams. So far downtime is even worse. Rumors about about them dropping Ruby on Rails, but who really knows.

By: Brian Swartzfager

Brian Swartzfager — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:21:18 +0000

Twitter has always had issues with uptime and scalability, so don’t expect that to improve anytime soon. I think most hard-core Twitter uses have come to reconcile themselves to the fact that it’ll be unavailable every once in awhile.