Twitter Tweets Some Big Q1 Stats; 155 Million Tweets A Day Now | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Tweets Some Big Q1 Stats; 155 Million Tweets A Day Now

techcrunch.com

21 pointsbigstorm11 comments

I love twitter, but I wonder how many of these 155 million tweets/day are spam?

probably. But 155 m tweets/day is huge. I guess it's no more the birds carrying the blue whale. they have certainly improved their architecture, if not perfected it.

I did see the Fail Whale once or twice last week and my client (TweetDeck) occasionally hits API errors, so it isn't perfected quite yet. But handling 1800 tweets a second and pushing them to real-time streams is no small task.

handling 1800 tweets a second [...] is no small task

It's funny how people consistently overestimate that. Actually, yes, it is a fairly trivial task and there's no justification for failwhaling over it when you have money to buy competent developers.

Many companies process orders of magnitudes more than that, under much harder constraints and much more complex requirements (think financial industry and telecoms).

that number is probably averaged out. I bet it's probably more like 100,000 a second around peak hours and 500 a second in non-peak.

Most of the companies you cite make on the order of dollars per transaction. It's easy to build out infrastructure to handle that volume when you're making that kind of money.

It's funny how people who haven't built similar systems underestimate how difficult it is, Mr/Mrs Anonymous Internet Tough Person.

Phone companies and financial institutions don't typically have messages which affect millions of accounts, for a start.

Actually I have built similar systems, on a smaller scale.

Phone companies and financial institutions don't typically have messages which affect millions of accounts, for a start.

You're saying that as if it was a relevant metric. It's not. What matters is the number of concurrently online subscribers and the aggregate throughput. Twitter doesn't go and append to 1mio inboxes when akutcher sends a tweet.

Or just plain bot activity.

Well, this metric doesn't say anything about profit or profitability, even indirectly. It also doesn't say anything about number of users or active users as I expect a large portion of these new tweets to be made by bots.

It does tell me that Twitter has the infrastructure to handle the server load which I guess is somewhat interesting, but not much..

That's great and all - when are they going to do contextual ads... I'd love to try it out.

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