Why is twitter so buggy?

Question

If you ever used twitter for at least a couple of weeks, big chances are you've seen the twitter whale.

I am now following the twitter api account and most of their tweets are about some broken feature or not available at the moment. The last one I just saw is about missing tweets in my time line, which happens pretty often I must say.

But why is that? didn't the think the solution right? they should have been able to fix it by now, right? With all this buzz about cloud computing and huge amount of storage available plus the compute services some providers offer, why are we still seeing errors like the mentioned above.

This is not a question of whether you like twitter or not, I want to understand what the problem is and if people thinks it is an architectural problem (should they throw everything away and start from scratch) or is it a scalability problem, or what...

Answer 1

You have to realize that twitter servers get HAMMERED by people. The sheer amount of connections their servers handle, the data flow, and the rate on which twitter updates code all lead to this. The Whale as mentioned is shown for all errors on Twitter because they don't want to disclose the type of error that occured (which is a good thing).

So be it someone finds a way to insert script, XML, or something else into twitter to mess up some users, or just a connection problem, you will see a whale.

As for fixing the problem? Yea they are. They get new servesr, better connections all the time. But with any system, the more people that user it, and the more people that try to abuse it, you're going to get errors, it's just numbers.

If I am correct, Twitter was built using Ruby on Rails - something not designed for sites that require high performance.