All Twitter Mobile Traffic Is Now Powered by Node.js | Hacker News Reader

All Twitter Mobile Traffic Is Now Powered by Node.js

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75 pointsakras1415 comments

Wish they'd do a full write-up. I'd be interested in how they run their node processes.

  - Using containers, VMs, bare metal?
  - Using a process manager like Forever[1], PM2[2] or just native systemd?

[1] https://github.com/foreverjs/forever

[2] https://github.com/Unitech/pm2

They probably will a bit later. Highly doubt that they use forever or pm2 tho.

Out of curiosity ( because we use pm2 here, and it works well ) why would you doubt them using those solutions?

Probably because it doesn't scale for their needs/fit rest of their system.

Judging from their other infrastructure talks its far more likely they are shipping the application in a container to Apache Aurora, and having the process managed by Mesos.

I can't remember if all their services are now running on Mesos, but I'd bet their newer ones are.

I'm still confused.

Did they add a layer between their backend and mobile to pre-render the page server side, or did they get rid of their whole scala/jvm stack to replace it with Node?

My guess is they have a front with Nodejs for mobile.twitter.com and behind that you have all their scala/jvm microservices. Recoding all their microservices would be way too expensive. I don't think they use Nodejs for their RESTful API but I am curious to see more about that. Uber uses Nodejs for their GPS API so who knows...

ha, that would make sense!

They seem to have done this only for Webpack (splitting JS libs + prefetching).

Why use Node at all? It's all static content...

Crazy that a top engineering post is about some company discovering "compile-time".

Next post will be about how they discovered this thing they call Testing?

That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Maybe they'll discover bootstrap ;)

Most likely they include a bit of Server Side Rendering using the same templates they have in their compiled asset. Actually getting to share code here would be a pretty big win.

I remember seeing Twitter switching from ruby/rails to the JVM for a lot of their backend a few years ago. I wonder why they're using node now (unless the mobile traffic was never moved to the JVM)?

https://www.infoq.com/articles/twitter-java-use

I'm impressed, it's very snappy.

anyone knows why it was done?

why did not go for go

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