Scaling Twitter

Twitter has come a long way since its first incarnations in Jack Dorsey’s notebook. Even though it may be ignored by the most, it is still extremely popular with over 11 000 requests per second. As anyone with technical sense would guess, this leads to massive scaling issues.

It is built upon Rails, a very nice tool but maybe not the fastest horse on the track. Twitter developer Alex Payne recently shared his thoughts on the matter, which generated a reply by the Rails God, David Heinemeier Hansson. I’m not good enough at Rails to make any suggestions better than these guys, but Twitter’s situation is interesting regardless of any Rails skills.