Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime
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."
I find it kind of strange that a site as incredibly simple as Twitter had so much downtime. Granted, they probably don't have the multiple dedicated redundant datacenters to their name like MySpace and Facebook do... but still, they're only serving little tidbits of text.
Well, I don't care so much about the downtime.
However, your post shows extreme shortsightedness to what the people of this world are interested in. Yeah, Facebook, Twitter and the like *can* be extreme wastes of time. But, there is a reason that so many people are drawn to those sites. As engineers and "nerds," it would be interesting to not only know why (psychology playing a huge role in this), but what can be done to leverage technologies like these to actually provide something "worthwhile." (I put worthwhile in quotes as the worth of something is very relative.)
What may or may not be important to you is not what the populace as a whole agrees with. You're definitely entitled to your own opinion (and I will agree with you to some extent), but given the number of users of these sites, it's important to consider the bigger picture and implications.
I think there is some truth in that, but the reason why most people use these sites is peer pressure, purely and simply. It's just a fad for most people. It's just like a local bar or club becomes the in place to go to -- without any substance. Being the reason why there's a drift from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to the next thing.
Personally I can see absolutely no use for Facebook nor Twitter whatsoever. But now that the sparkly teenage girls have left MySpace for the next thing, MySpace is actually a useful site. If you are an artist of some sort, MySpace is a great tool for networking and showcasing your work. Facebook is worthless for that, since you have to become friends with someone to see their profile.
It could be that there are genuine core uses for Facebook and Twitter too -- though I cannot personally think of what they could be.
I mean wtf? This has been dubunked so many times.
After this announcement someone wrote a plugin for rails that handled multiple databases.
And you know, we had this huge ruby on rails application that never really took off. I would had really loved to have those performance issues they were describing.
One of the most amusing error messages ever 3 Where the hell did it come from? Why is it flying with birds? What the fuck is this shit? Who knows! It's fail whale!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I am an anti-fanatic. I use the best tools for whatever job I may be doing. I program in Java, Perl, Php, Python, C++, C#, and, when I must, Cobol. I make fun of everyone who claims that their tool is the best tool in every situation.
I'll tell you exactly what Twitter's problem is: Ruby is a shitty database interface. That's it. So is PHP, so is Perl, so is VB.Net. I don't even like Java and C# for that stuff, though they're a whole lot better. Python is, but you can write a C lib to do it for Python, so it isn't (though I still wouldn't use Django). For this volume of data you need something lean and close to the hardware.
They need a better caching system, period. If they're going to try and do the whole thing in Ruby, more power to 'em. But they damn well shouldn't be surprised when obvious crap like this rears up later.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I've never used CakePHP before, but every benchmark I find on it suggests that it's horribly slower (10-100x slower, if not more) than stock PHP. For example, over here they get 37.46 requests/s for a hello world CakePHP page on a 3 GHz Intel machine with 512M RAM. I gave a plain PHP hello world page a try on a 1.3 GHz Pentium-M laptop with 512M RAM (a substantially slower machine) with the same ab parameters and I get 1254.75 requests/s. In other words, the substantially slower machine gave 33x better performance with stock PHP than the substantially faster machine gave with CakePHP.
So yes, maybe RoR has comparable performance to CakePHP, but who cares? CakePHP is painfully slow and I don't know anyone or anything that actually uses it. Wake me up with RoR (or Ruby) is faster than stock PHP.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!