Twitter Throttling Hits Third-Party Apps

Barence writes "Twitter's battle to keep the microblogging service from falling over is having a dire affect on third-party Twitter apps. Users of Twitter-related apps such as TweetDeck, Echofon and even Twitter's own mobile software have complained of a lack of updates, after the company imposed strict limits on the number of times third-party apps can access the service. Over the past week, Twitter has reduced the number of API calls from 350 to 175 an hour. At one point last week, that number was temporarily reduced to only 75. A warning on TweetDeck's support page states that users 'should allow TweetDeck to ensure you do not run out of calls, although with such a small API limit, your refresh rates will be very slow.'"

Comments

175/hr is slow?

[rotide]

Isn't that an update nearly every 20 seconds? How fast do people need to see that you're currently wiping your butt?

Re:175/hr is slow?

[the_one_wesp]

If you're only following a single feed. But I have like 10 lists in TweetDeck that all get individually queried, and there are some who have WAY more than that.

But I am inclined to comment about this bit of "news"... Big. Woop. Twitter's just trying to stay alive. If the service falls over NO UPDATES will happen... at all... Inconvenient, yes, but totally necessary.

It's time to ditch the NoSQL bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's high time that the so-called "Web 2.0" companies ditch the NoSQL bullshit they've started to put into place. It's not bringing the scalability benefits they all claimed it would, and it's leading to data with very questionable reliability otherwise (not that their data is particularly valuable in the first place...)

A lot of these scalability problems could be solved by using a proper RDBMS on proper hardware that's designed to handle huge concurrent workloads. This level of traffic isn't new by any means. There are many POS systems around the world, from retail operations to airlines, that deal with a similar level of "traffic".

It doesn't matter if they go with a database and hardware stack from Oracle, or a DB2 and hardware stack from IBM, or even use Sybase's ASE on hardware from HP. They just need to invest in some real hardware and some real database systems that are meant for dealing with absolutely huge loads.

Ditch NoSQL databases. Ditch shitty servers. Start using real software, and start using real hardware. That's what other businesses do when they "grow up". If twitter is a viable business, it's time for them to grow up, too.

Re:Monty Python

[spazdor]

Company bases a business model on offering their resources for free, only to discover to their chagrin that people will take them up on it. Where oh where have I heard this one before?