It’s fair to say the world of micro-blogging has become an increasingly important part of the footprint social media addicts and businesses leave in the online space. Platforms like Twitter mean personal, social and professional news can be shared quickly and concisely with a listening audience who are prepared to engage their response in a similar fashion.
The Royal Pingdom blog recently mapped out the increase in the number of tweets seen in the past year and has predicted that by January 2011, we could see up to 6.7 billion a month if trends continue. Will Twitter be able to cope with these kind of predicted increases in traffic? Twitter, as many users will tell you has had issues around the performance and reliability of the service on a number of occasions in the past.
Twitter’s ability to provide a running commentary on a variety of issues requires consistent performance and reliability as all messages appear at the time of posting. Performance issues will definitely not be news to Twitter staff, so how do Twitter plan to keep up with this predicted increase in demand for their service? At a basic level the service is going to have to process considerably more tweets - How do they plan to scale the infrastructure to cope with this?
Well...thanks to the powers of the inter-web and Google I came across a presentation given by John Adams, Operations Engineer at Twitter this month at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The presentation 'Billions of Hits - Scaling Twitter' will certainly appeal to those of a technical disposition. It gives a great insight to the infrastructure and applications they have in place and some of the issues they face. One slide in particular caught my attention; performance impacts of abuse and why rate limiting is so important. I plan to touch on this next week in a post where I will discuss the request rate shaping capabilities of Zeus Traffic Manager. The post will look at how Zeus can deal with the kind of abuses mentioned by Twitter and negate the impact on the performance of your applications and services.
Mark Gyles
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