Repost: Amazing what you can do with Statistic Spin

Twitter is what some call a micro blogger. Essentially you get an account, post in a maximum of 140 character “posts” and other twitter subscribers follow your posts. You of course follow your friends, interests, famous people etc. I’ve got an account, couple of friends and web acquaintances are on their and the latest Mars Lander.

If you already knew about Twitter then you must know they have been having lots of problems. Service outages, have been rampant of late. They have basically from what I can tell outgrown the basic infrastructure they went with. They had found a nitch, were quirky enough to sneak up on folks then BLAME, exploded. Another problem they have I think is their general openness of their API. There are “spammers” out there following 17,000 people. No way is that a human on the other end of that twitter account.

Well today was WWDC which is where Apple rolls out the next frenzy of non products that the Apple Geeks freak out over. As expected (even by twitter) it went down.

It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%

Initially, we turned off some features to shed load as we announced yesterday but we were able to turn them back on during the keynote as Twitter handled the dramatic amount of traffic. About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.

I’m sorry but those numbers are just the downtime for today. Not to mention, saying 4% of the requests telling people to wait for a few minutes was acceptable…. They are fooling themselves. Eventually one of their competitors will step up and be able to handle the load. Folks will jump ship like crazy. Also live software used by hundereds of thousands of people, some of who are watching a very important event ( to them anyway ) is not what I would call a stress TEST.