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

75 updates per hour

[VisiX]

Any information that needs to be distributed more than once per minute probably shouldn't be relying on twitter.

Protocol overhead

[ickleberry]

I wonder if it would have much of an impact if they switched from the verbose JSON/XML over HTTP formats for the API to a binary UDP-based protocol. Twitter seems well suited to such a protocol since it is so simple and the messages ar so short

Is it that they are doing too much processing on the data, wasting too much bandwidth or is their database causing trouble? Since its twitter obviously any bandwidth used is a waste, but you know what I mean

Re:It's time to ditch the NoSQL bullshit.

[Knux]

Any telecom does way more than that.

I've worked in a big telecom with 40mi+ clients and I've seen an 8 nodes Oracle RAC responsible for the whole pre-paid client database handle far, far more transactions and queries than Twitter says it does.

Each regional server responsible for authorizing the calls has a 2 node Oracle RAC and it too handles far more transactions and queries than Twitter.

So, there you go... The excuse to use NoSQL was that it is quicker in some cases. It's not, time to move back to RDBMS.