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His approach isn't so good, as it creates a copy for the same message sent to multiple users.

Better safe the messages in a central store by id and only write the ids to the different pages.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188080

I considered this, but given that the messages are small and the primary issue is scaling not storage this, it does not seem to me is a good solution. The entirety of everything ever written on twitter is probably not big enough to worry about storage size. The issue is performance. By the way, this architecture is essentially how email works. All your inbound messages are stored in one place separate from outbound messages from the sender. This allows for infinite horizontal scaling.

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