Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime

Posted by timothy on from the great-to-be-top-of-the-list dept.

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."

6 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. 84 hours???? by sunking2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And yet it had 0% impact on my life. So who really cares.

  2. Does it make that much difference? by Thornburg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Twitter was the worst, with 84 hours downtime, one year is 8765.81277 hours, which means that Twitter was down .958268243% of the time. Not .9 (90%), but .009 (nine tenths of one percent). IOW, it has an uptime of 99.05%. Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! doesn't manage that, and I know Microsoft's download servers don't manage that...

    1. Re:Does it make that much difference? by Colonel+Korn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If Twitter was the worst, with 84 hours downtime, one year is 8765.81277 hours, which means that Twitter was down .958268243% of the time. Not .9 (90%), but .009 (nine tenths of one percent). IOW, it has an uptime of 99.05%. Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! doesn't manage that, and I know Microsoft's download servers don't manage that...

      Good numerical point, but Yahoo hasn't failed to load for me any time in the last 10 years, with something like 10-50 page views per day. Their uptime is thus no worse than based 0.99997 on my experience, which is means 300x less downtime than twitter.

      --
      "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
  3. Re:'Get a life' as a positive suggestion by clone53421 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No kidding. I've always been frustrated with people who claim they're "deleting my account because of the amount of time I waste on here". Hello? Just stop spending so much time on it...

    The only reason I can think of to delete your account would be if you actually wanted to mass-delete every note and posted item you'd posted, every post on your wall, and every tag that you'd ever been given. Otherwise, just disappear for a week or three. Your "friends" will forgive you, and the real ones might even call or e-mail if they're really that concerned about you falling off the face of the earth.

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  4. Re:84 hours?!?! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh BS. A huge volume of extremely easy data. No images, no War & Peace length text posts. Just a lot of short, sweet, and simple text.

    I want you to say with a straight face that it's really just the amazing volume of data that separates a highly reliable and available site like Facebook from a constantly failing jumped up IRC client like Twitter.

    Twitter is a dog. And because it's written in Rails, it's a special needs dog that has to go to the vet a lot.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  5. What is the uptime metric? by 222 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I no longer use Myspace (Thank god!) but it seemed like every time I tried to do something, I was redirected to an error page assuring me that their support staff would be notified...

    Sure, Myspace was able to display html in my browser, but it seems a bit far fetched to consider that "uptime".