Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime 175
illectro writes "A study on site availability by monitoring service Pingdom shows that in 2008 Twitter greeted users with the 'Fail Whale' for more than 84 hours, almost twice as much as any other site. At the other end of the scale imeem and Xanga managed less than 4 hours of downtime for 99.95% uptime. Myspace, Facebook and Classmates.com were the only other sites studied which managed to stay up more than 99.9% of the time."
They are cut off (Score:1, Informative)
So go out and get some sunshine or something.
Twitter doesn't work by design (Score:5, Informative)
I think many of us recognize the potential power of twitter-like thingies. With this in mind I recently joined. It is beyond disappointing.
- the site itself is barren, with basically no features - it is just like a '98 site in a bad way (not in a "Google-like" minimalist way)
- can't get updates by SMS in Europe. OK, fair game, it isn't free. But you should be able to at least post by SMS, right? Somehow although they do offer local numbers (very nice) I wasn't able to actually verify any phone so can't update by SMS
- they had updates by Instant Messenger as official feature for a while but couldn't make it work (why?! at least it should be practically free for them unlike SMS)
- there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party)
- same as above for updates by email
So, yes, nice idea but poor execution.
Re:Twitter doesn't work by design (Score:2, Informative)
- there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party)
The Pidgin Twitter plugin [google.com] works [twitter.com].
mod parent down (wrong) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Twitter Developer Alex Payne on Rails performan (Score:4, Informative)
Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.
That is probably true. However, I would count that as an advantage -- better to deal with them sooner than later.
At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time.
There are many, many ways to talk to more than one database in Rails. In fact, it is possible to swap out the entire database layer of Rails and use another ORM, or no ORM at all. On the bleeding edge -- and Twitter might actually be a good candidate for this -- people have wired up Rails to CouchDB, which provides trivially scalable multimaster replication, and which, being HTTP, can be thrown behind any old load balancer -- which brings this back to a "just throw hardware at it" problem.
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
Some of them do -- a good example would be Symbol.to_proc.
However, Merb proves that this is not actually a Ruby problem, it is a Rails problem. And Rails and Merb are merging some point in the near future.
It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. [...] I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Somewhat true -- after all, Ruby 1.9.1 did double the performance of the language.
But, relative to what?
Turns out that, at least compared to other languages and frameworks (like PHP), Ruby is not slow [slideshare.net].
It's also worth mentioning that while all of the Twitter alternatives may have enjoyed better uptime, they haven't had nearly the amount of traffic that Twitter does. We don't really know if they can scale -- but even supposing they can, Twitter was there first. And while they complain about those nice features being slow, they probably owe their success to those features for getting their product out the door faster than their competitors.
It's also worth mentioning that this interview is almost two years old. Rails changes a lot in two years. In fact, Twitter were early adopters -- two years before that interview, Rails had only just shared commit rights. Two years before that, it didn't exist at all.
It might be worth asking what version of Rails Twitter is using, and if they've noticed a change since then.