Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : How many servers does it take to run Twitter?

[SinglehopDS]

I've been wondering how server intensive Twitter is. Does anyone have any stats on this or ideas?

[squirrelhost]

http://highscalability.com/scaling-t...percent-faster

[SinglehopDS]

Good info. Thanks!

[squirrelhost]

or if that's too scary, use this:

http://www.revou.com/

says it's a clone of twitter, uses php and you run
it on your shared hosting account !

[SinglehopDS]

Thanks. But, it seems to me that Twitter does a fine job for now, its gone out for a few minutes here and there, but it gets the tweets across. Revou.com sounds more like a new "facebook" creator than just Tweeter. Its cool stuff though, have you used it?

[squirrelhost]

only mentioned Revou as all these little scripts are a joke really.
if someone used that, and traffic took off, wonder what they'd
actually do? give up probably. you need to get to grips with
not just stuff like memcache which is easy enough, but how to
handle persistent connections, else you'd run out of servers
with all the socket opens/closes/waits. Look like they've come
up with 'starling', not too different in philosophy from the shmproxy
yahoo developed back in late 1990's for ads, and everything else.
mind you, when I jumped ship two years ago, we were peaking at
around 500M ads/day in europe, and US was magnitudes larger.
it focuses the mind.

never used twitter either, still can't see the point in it all!

[SinglehopDS]

If anyone made Revou really work for them, they probably would be smart enough to set up something more long-term. But why re-invent the wheel?

I didnt get Twitter either, until i tried to search in it. Sear.twiter dot com. You can find conversations that are going on in cyberspace. Pick a word, like microsoft, or a city name, ect.. you can actually start connecting with people about topics that they care about. Right now we are actually driving a bit of business through Twitter because we can listen. We listen to what people want, what they are looking for, what they dont like etc.. Its a great tool for listening, which is, in my opinion, the larger part of selling and keeping a customer.

[HostXV]

Twitter has been super slow for me lately, and I run on High Speed Internet (Not normally purchased, it costs me $200+ / Month).

[squirrelhost]

maybe growing pains. like all big companies now, ops say we need 20 more servers at weekly hardware meeting, accountants say you can have 3.

[AstroNyu]

Wow, someone mentioned an "Alstrasoft" product.
Not a fan.

Anyone, I just don't think someone with twitter clone can be success. It just doesn't fit to be cloned. Tell me if there is a twitter like site that is as successful as twitter itself?

Anyway ,to run site like twitter with hundreds of thousand people using it daily, would require high specs servers.

[jshtoch]

I'd assume places like twitter have dozens of servers in different datacenters. Downtime for them really would cost a lot for real, it's not like when a $5 hosting customer says they are losing hundreds by the minute.

[SinglehopDS]

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/newrep...eply&p=6146109

I know that they have servers everywhere. I'm more curious about how many tweets accounts can a server generally handle. I would assume they do grid computing for the entire thing though... I guess It's all probably pretty secretive.

I actually don't think that under their current no-income model it would cost much. Even so, it just means that a tweet is delivered a few minutes late. Vs. a website where not finding a page can get pretty annoying.

[vincent91326]

Yeah how did it become so popular?

[dazmanultra]

Originally Posted by notmove

Yeah how did it become so popular?

They've had a lot of venture capital pushing them. They've also had so much PR in the last 12 months it's been ridiculous.

[SinglehopDS]

Originally Posted by notmove

Yeah how did it become so popular?

IMHO It became popular because it finally allowed for blog and facebook-like communications to become conversations. You can search any keyword and twitter and find people talking about it, then reply back, and voila! a conversation is begun. Its really hard to do that with a blog, or a FB or MS account. I use tweetdeck, it constantly searches up to 10 keywords of my interest and I can reply in real-time to someone in Turkey who mentions something about servers i'm interested in. When I began searching like that, Twitter suddenly made sense. A lot of sense.