Answer is Yes.
Twitter’s user base has continued to grow steadily with over 300,000 people signing up everyday. Keeping pace with these users and their activities definitely comes with complex engineering challenges. Twitter on their engineering blog said:
“We frequently compare the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight.”
It further says: We have made some improvements and optimizations as:
- Doubling the capacity of our internal network;
- Improving the monitoring of our internal network;
- Rebalancing the traffic on our internal network to redistribute the load;
- Doubling the throughput to the database that stores tweets;
- Making a number of improvements to the way we use memcache, improving the speed of Twitter while reducing internal network traffic; and,
- Improving page caching of the front and profile pages, reducing page load time by 80 percent for some of our most popular pages.
Everybody has witnessed how Twitter had Storm of Whales during the World Cup. Untill now, Twitter was using data centers built by NTT America in the Salt Lake City Area but this is not sufficient when you see 300,000 people signing up everyday. So, Twitter has decided to build it’s own Data Center. John Adams, lead engineer for application services says:
- Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.
- Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers.
We hope with this New Data Center, people see less of outage and more of twitter’s availability, making it more reliable and true to people’s expectations.
