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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."
And yet it had 0% impact on my life. So who really cares.
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.
Go outside, take a sunbath, twitter your friend about it... err, ha, well...
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
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...
And here I am worrying about whether I should see my doctor after 4 hours of uptime.
This guy's the limit!
Twitter Shitter
I think many of us recognize the potential power of twitter-like thingies. With this in mind I recently joined. It is beyond disappointing.
- the site itself is barren, with basically no features - it is just like a '98 site in a bad way (not in a "Google-like" minimalist way)
- can't get updates by SMS in Europe. OK, fair game, it isn't free. But you should be able to at least post by SMS, right? Somehow although they do offer local numbers (very nice) I wasn't able to actually verify any phone so can't update by SMS
- they had updates by Instant Messenger as official feature for a while but couldn't make it work (why?! at least it should be practically free for them unlike SMS)
- there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party)
- same as above for updates by email
So, yes, nice idea but poor execution.
Your post, however, was a great contribution to society and will be studied for years by future generations.
Go outside, take a sunbath, twitter your friend about it... err, ha, well...
No, what you need to do in that situation is go and create a Facebook group about it.
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'm now posting on /. about Twitter.
I live such a full life.
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.
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".
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.
That is probably true. However, I would count that as an advantage -- better to deal with them sooner than later.
At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time.
There are many, many ways to talk to more than one database in Rails. In fact, it is possible to swap out the entire database layer of Rails and use another ORM, or no ORM at all. On the bleeding edge -- and Twitter might actually be a good candidate for this -- people have wired up Rails to CouchDB, which provides trivially scalable multimaster replication, and which, being HTTP, can be thrown behind any old load balancer -- which brings this back to a "just throw hardware at it" problem.
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
Some of them do -- a good example would be Symbol.to_proc.
However, Merb proves that this is not actually a Ruby problem, it is a Rails problem. And Rails and Merb are merging some point in the near future.
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.
Somewhat true -- after all, Ruby 1.9.1 did double the performance of the language.
But, relative to what?
Turns out that, at least compared to other languages and frameworks (like PHP), Ruby is not slow.
It's also worth mentioning that while all of the Twitter alternatives may have enjoyed better uptime, they haven't had nearly the amount of traffic that Twitter does. We don't really know if they can scale -- but even supposing they can, Twitter was there first. And while they complain about those nice features being slow, they probably owe their success to those features for getting their product out the door faster than their competitors.
It's also worth mentioning that this interview is almost two years old. Rails changes a lot in two years. In fact, Twitter were early adopters -- two years before that interview, Rails had only just shared commit rights. Two years before that, it didn't exist at all.
It might be worth asking what version of Rails Twitter is using, and if they've noticed a change since then.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
does this mean metalhed77 wants to punch Alex Payne in the face?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The social non-networking site I use, isolatr.com, is never down, and has never failed to bring me zero annoying "friends". I highly recommend it.
While I don't use twitter, it's downtime is bad enough (or people are obsessed enough) that not only is there IsTwitterDown.com but also IsIsTwitterDownDown.com
I think that says it all, right there.
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