[erlang-questions] Twoorl: an open source Twitter clone

[Paul Stanley]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 8:23 AM, Steve <steven.charles.davis@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> Hmmm, Yariv, aren't you still thinking about this in the way that Dave
> Smith pointed to as the heart of the issue? i.e.
> Dave said: "My understanding is that the reason they have such poor
> uptime is due to the fact that they modeled the problem as a web-app
> instead of a messaging system."

This seems to be the Twitter developers' own conclusion, too
(http://dev.twitter.com/2008/05/twittering-about-architecture.html):

"Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected
as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built
with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content
management system. Over the last year and a half we've tried to make our
system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that's
introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. When we're
in crisis mode, adding more instrumentation to help us navigate the web
of interdependencies in our current architecture is often our primary
recourse. This is, clearly, not optimal."

It's worth googling "twitter architecture". There's a lot of rather feverish
discussion on the various issues, but some of it is illuminating.

-- 
Paul Stanley