Scripting News - Latest Comments in Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

skwp — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:16:01 -0000

If people are restarting mongrel it's typically because of their own leaky code. Nginx is a production grade webserver and the recommended solution. See engineyard.com for an example of a solid Rails hosting stack.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

macewan — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:01:02 -0000

Switch to Pownce or Jaiku. Neither has displayed problems at least not in my hands on use. Should anyone need an invite just give me a buzz.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

segfault — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:36:13 -0000

I built Web Apps with RoR, and this is not FUD. RoR scalability is harder because there isn't any established, production-grade (eg Apache) web server that Rails can work efficiently with.

RoR community basically gave up on Apache (FCGI/CGI/whatever), Lighttpd has its own issues and Mongrel is just not there yet (some sites set a cronjob to restart it every hour)

Rails is neat, Ruby is beautiful, but without a good web server its indeed hard to scale. As FUD goes, the hyposphere is definitely on RoR's side anyway.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

A. T. — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 07:41:49 -0000

just go off that Twitter, switch to Jaiku and have a fun of un-interruptible service, with notifications gone both SMS (mobile) and XMPP (yes, GTalk too), and vibrant community... need inivitation? ;)

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

skwp — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:04:37 -0000

Thanks for this intelligent bit of FUD. Why is RoR scalability different than any other web platform?

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Guest — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:51:24 -0000

Weird. As soon as I bless Twiiter with my words, I get followers. Very unscientific, since I've only reached out once to the twitter community, but, somehow, even though I am pretty convinced that my words are gospel to any intelligent being, I suspect that if Twitter goes down my followers will survive.

After all, at the end of the day, I believe in the hardiness of people, twittlee dum, or not.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Allan Stewart — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:48:43 -0000

Hi,

Twitter is always problematic, goes up and down. Has done since its first conception. I should expect that they have a linux cluster with some kind of a load balancer. I suspect its something to do with too many concurrent connections, they could take this down on each machine and add some move servers to the cluster. Either this or their LB machine is too slow...

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

timoni — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:39:51 -0000

Why do you suggest having a meeting with "a few people from the tech community", rather than just having more details from Twitter?

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:57:44 -0000

twitter is down for the same reason that blogger went down all the time. it's being designed to maximize interestingness, not to maximize reliability. going down from time to time makes for a better corporate story..

you don't think they are running a back office for an insurance company, do you?

systems under development should crash from the load from time to time just to give you a chance to reflect upon what you are doing and stress them past the point of breakage. It's rare that most developers get to see things like congestive collapse inside a system of their own design that they can fix.

don't like it? start an irc server on a machine in some monkey's basement and chat with your friends. that works fine since 10+ years ago.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Eddie Dickey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:25:44 -0000

It'd be nice if they could display a message when they go down - but it seems internet connectivity is the current problem so they can't display a 'busy' page. It's a bit of a mystery when the site is down and why.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

dave — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:26:35 -0000

Jeremy, thanks for the update. As far as I know there have been no changes to the tcp.im interface for Jabber. You can check it out by downloading the FlickrFan release and jump to tcp.im. http://flickrfan.org/

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Jeremy Bowers — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:19:37 -0000

Assuming nobody has touched the Jabber driver for Frontier/Radio Userland since I wrote it, the problem is that Jabber/XMPP clients now tend to absolutely require upgrading to TLS connections, or starting the connection out with SSL, where it was merely an option at the time.

At the time that I wrote the driver, there were no SSL drivers for Frontier/Radio Userland, so the driver does not support it. A quick Google search shows what looks to be a for-pay driver, which looks an awful lot like it only works for HTTPS anyhow. (IIRC, last I knew that was the case, but this is from a long time ago.) Could be wrong, I'm just guessing from the docs.

Most of the public sites will have the same problem. You'd have to run your own server and allow plain-text connections. At that point, if you got the federation setup correct, you could talk to the full Jabber federated network.

If this was fixed, it would otherwise work. The parts of the protocol that have changed since then are mostly really high-level things like conference rooms; the rest of the support would still work.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Gato — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:25:30 -0000

Dave, we will make either IgniteRealtime.org or another option. Let's connect about what you need.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Rex Pechler — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:42:22 -0000

you can script iChat with AppleScript to talk with Twitter's Jabber bot with your Google Talk account.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Steve — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:48:06 -0000

http://www.joyeur.com/2008/...

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:22:00 -0000

I was going to post a reply to Biz Stone's blog post, suggesting that Twitter convene a select list of customers under NDA to advise them on both technical and monetization matters.

However, comments were not enabled for the Biz Stone post.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I find that interesting.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:19:20 -0000

I read this post and Biz Stone's response, and I'm thinking that a small group of outside advisors, under NDA, is the...um...obvious solution. Not just for technical issues, but also for the monetization issue that they keep on deferring.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

jhayworth — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:58:15 -0000

I posted some thoughts about this on my blog (http://www.joshuahayworth.c...

I absolutely agree with David Geller on this. Twitter is not an open, user supported, community tool. However, I have an idea about how we might develop one. The infrastructure is simple (in my opinion) and within the range of capabilities of the platform that Radio/OPML Editor/FlickrFan was written on.

Take a look at this: http://distributedtwitter.p...

What do you think?

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Matthew Gifford — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:56:48 -0000

Never mind what I said about the problem being Joyent. Twitter left them last night.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Jimmy — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:55:08 -0000

Look at this post from Biz, http://www.bizstone.com/200....

99.99%?! Man, we'll just take 99%.

99.99% is a max of 52 minutes 33 seconds of downtime per year (no "scheduled downtime" cheating). Not many Web sites, even the best like eBay, easily achieve it.

Advice: Work on 99%. It'll take you a year just to get there.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Nona Myous — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:36:43 -0000

re: interfaces not supported by scripting environment

If the problem with Google Talk's implementation of the XMPP protocol, or is the problem with XMPP in general?

If the problem is with Google Talk's implementation and not XMPP, then try creating an account at jabber.org or one of the other open services listed here: http://www.jabber.org/user/... . Most XMPP client applications (Psi, Adium, Pidgen, ...) have the ability to create an account at an open service.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

dave — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:00:48 -0000

Eric, I didn't mean to imply that I should be one of the people they brief. They should pick people they trust, and you're right -- even if it's under NDA, it would still be helpful. As long as they're also people that the community trusts.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

ifyoumakeit — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:47:31 -0000

Dave, I think that's a great idea and hope they take you up on the offer. Even if the put you under NDA and you can't share the contents of your meeting, it would be great at this point for them to assemble a "counsel of users" that can act as a PR shield by saying "we've heard their plans and we believe it, so just hold tight". I'll have to do that with my next gig.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Anthony — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:37:54 -0000

Their problems are more fundamental and go way beyond RoR.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Anthony — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:29:38 -0000

"Infrastructure overhaul?" They ought to do themselves a favor and stop saying that, b/c with all the overhauls and upgrades and maintenance they had over the last several months, you'd think they'd be on an upward path. Instead, they're spiraling down.

My take is, they have no experience with scalability/reliability/availability (e.g., they don't know how to "fail fast") and they're trying to learn the very hard way. They may get there, 2 years from now. Have you seen their queueing component they open sourced. YIKES! I'm sure it gets worse from there.

They claim to have recently hired an expert, and I could just picture it now: He starts putting in place all his pieces (processes, architecture, h/w, s/w, etc), and, well, it turns out he has no idea how to scale ***this type of service*** either. Not his fault. He never did it before, and they all naively believed "scalability is just scalability."

Twitter needs to bring in a real expert.