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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."

3 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. 84 hours?!?! by RoFLKOPTr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Twitter Developer Alex Payne on Rails performance by dandv · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In an interview with RadicalBehavior.com, Twitter lead developer Alex Payne commented:

    By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework. [...] At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. [...] All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both. It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. [...] I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

  3. Re:Twitter, Facebook, MySpace by D+Ninja · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.