The Truth Why Twitter is Over Capacity

Categories: MicroMedia, RuminationsPosted on May 28th, 2008

[See handwritten green notes over image to understand why]

Lately, Twitter has been down more than the ground. So many are commenting why Twitter is having so many issues: scalability due to Ruby on Rails, mainstream adoption from press and media, or even just Scoble after two many cappuccinos.

After painstaking analysis of Twitter’s 404 page (above image), I’ve found the reason for the downtime of Twitter, it’s not what you expected: the infrastructure, users, or external factors, it really comes down to poor deployment of internal resources.

Whales can only go one way, gotta get those birds going the same way.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under MicroMedia, Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

pixites

did ev or biz tell you? btw, birds are not in the sea, they're on air;)

Ike Pigott

Are those swallows African, or European?

marc uhlig

so what do you mean with poor deployment of internal resources?

putting manpower on the wrong projects? wasting money on other things than server capacity? having semi professional developers working on the core application?

until further clarification i still think its a ror issue... :-)

Matt

@# 3 - he means the birds. (But RoR aint helping... hehehe)

jeremiah_owyang

marc

See image, look carefully.

Andrew

Good catch :).

By the way, it's not a RoR issue. It's either a lack of servers, or a poorly built infrastructure. Rails scales just fine if you know how to build a scalable application (just like any other framework/language).

@alexdc

Making a whale fly is a sysyphian task, to say the least. It's time to rethink the whole thing and start from scratch. This whale ain't never gonna fly.

marc uhlig

jeremiah

thanks for the hint, i guess i need glasses :-)

ok, so no ror issue, poor management instead...

GregHay

@ Ike
Wow, talk about a nerd joke LOL, that's about the pinnacle... and I can't believe I got it... crap.

Jeremiah, that's funny. We were talking about this in my office yesterday; whether it's good or bad that they have a "cute" 404 page. I'd have to say a bad sign that they do, but brand wise sort of good for us that they acknowledge their issues.

chris

or maybe it's a PR stunt, heck we all talk about twitter when it's down rather then just using twitter when it's up (just kidding)

Ryan Graves

Here is a suggested solution for twitters capacity issues. I think a caffeinated Scoble is 50% of the issue for sure...

Ryan Graves

sorry this is the link http://ryanagraves.com/05/21/2008/possible-twit...

Tom Shea

i had no idea you had such a sense of humor...

at least they've upgraded from the hamster-in-wheels and the o-so-dated dwarfs-on-levers.

tinythoughts

haha, jeremiah, i should have expected something like that from you. you crack me up. marc uhlig cracks me up all the time too :-)

jeremiah_owyang

@Tom

Analysts have no humor, you're mistaken.

friarminor

Very observant, Jeremiah!

So do those bird know Rails or what? Looks to me half of them are migrating and some continue on their present course. Which is which, not sure.

Best.
alain

Jennifer Leggio

I love it! lol. Digging now.

Rhonda

ahahahaha!! Thanks for pointing this out. I can't believe I never noticed this.

Sonny Gill

lol nice.

On a serious note, Jeremiah, do you feel Twitter can rebound from their recent miscues and an apparent loss of 'thunder' that it held on to for quite some time now?

Tom Guarriello

Well, it looks like they've reached "big company" management capability before they reached big company status. I mean, it usually takes at least 300 people to get half going one way and half the other!

Reaching scale early: priceless!

Congrats, ev & biz!

Kat Rice

All I have to say is: Awesome.

Cheers mate, way to spot the real problem.

But hey, whales are cool!

Merrycricket

Jeremiah,

Thanks for the chuckle. I am always struck by the fact that the whale would be much easier to move if it were floating in the water. Bringing it out of the water makes it weigh more. Maybe the problem is the birds are ALL following the orders of some Twit who doesn't know squat about how to move a whale. Then the two birds flying the wrong way would be the hero's for pointing out how absurd the request was in the first place.

jeremiah_owyang

Merrycricket

Maybe you've got it all backwards, perhaps the whale is trying to bring the birds down.

Ami Chitwood

Is the whale sleeping? Please tell me the whale is sleeping, right? Right? It's not dead or anything?

Jeremiah - thanks for the laugh and the "d'oh" moment b/c it took me a minute to really "see."

porridge

Jeremiah, you are hilar.

It's funny, when I saw the new whale-themed 404 page today, my first thought was, "Why doesn't Twitter divert their resources from clever artistic 'sorry our site crashed' pages into actual fixing the problem?" A novel thought, I know.

Ian Timothy

Hmmm, if you look at the picture, there are 4 birds facing one way and 4 birds facing the other.

Maybe the objective isn't to get the whale to move to the right or to the left but just to get the whale, which could be a metaphor for the chunky unwieldy code Twitter has, to move up (i.e. SCALE UP).

So, the birds facing different directions could be just to balance the horizontal forces so that whale will only move along one axis which is the vertical one.

Who knows. Back to analyzing Alias.

Laurel Papworth

I love the humour of "helpful" birds actually creating the problem :)

Interesting things happen when someone comes at you from the opposite point of view. If creative mashable things happen, I'm happy for Twitter to have a nervous breakdown once in a while.

Nice to see some levity amongst the angst and sturm/drang of social media :P

TIGGR

@alexdc 100 Point word score for the use of Sisyphean!

PEDANT ALERT:
correction: spelt Sisyphean
"Endlessly laborious or futile"
__________________________________________________
adj.

1. Greek Mythology. Of or relating to Sisyphus.
2. Endlessly laborious or futile: “Their patients' lack of education and the high cost of medicine make health care a Sisyphean task” (Frank Gibney, Jr.).

[From Latin Sisyphēius, from Greek Sisupheios, from Sisuphos, Sisyphus.]

@CoachDeb

Aloha Jeremiah,

TX 4 sharing this!

I can't tell you how many peeps tell me that
"I broke Twitter" cuz I'm just like Scoble.

Naturally- I thank them & take it as a compliment.
But now I can tell them it's really NOT me - OR Scoble.

@CoachDeb
via Hawaii

Ryan

No way man, have you ever lifted a whale out of water? (ok. neither have I.)

The kind of fine-tuned coordination required is mind-boggling. I applaud the efforts of those tweets and you should too.

Shame! (:))

Ross Popoff-Walker

Poor birds. Maybe they're just trying to lift the whale UP... not actually move it left or right? :)

@amycham

Heehee....cute. Nothing like a couple of bad birds to crash the whole darn whale...

Adam Hevenor

Yep. Birds flying in the wrong direction is usually the problem. The real problem there is no lead bird guiding them along. Just a big fat whale of a problem to support.

BarbaraKB

A good chuckle...

Next post: naming contest for the whale. My suggestion: Moby.

@alexdc

@Tiggr LOL! You're right about the spelling, though; one should not rely on a Google search as a spell-checker ;)

"In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labour was everlasting and futile." http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-sis...

IAAdmin

It's amazing what you can see when you take the time to really look.

@BarbaraKB Because 25% of the birds aren't "team players," the same needs to be true for the whales name, hence, Mody............:)

Arturo Pelayo

Dear Jeremiah,

Not to obliterate the point you are trying to make but I couldn't help but notice that the graphic used, where, you (or an assistant) may have missed the other two birds that are theoretically flying in the opposite direction. Further, There is an equal amount of birds in either direction which should make this a "sitting duck" situation, I wonder why 'they' chose a whale to begin with. It may have been easier for eight birds to lift a duck than a whale, unless of course they think this is "a whale of a problem" ... : /

Maybe the birds are trying to save the whale from 'El Niño' (hence why the ocean is orange instead of blue).

Sorry, had to mention it. I am really good in details! However I could not find Waldo.... ;)

Thanks for your time,

Arturo.

AndreaM

PEDANT ALERT #2: it's not ...two many cappuccinos. Should be too many cappuccinos.

jeremiah_owyang

Ugh you're right.

Let's let it ride!

johan

Jeremiah - underneath it all, we are all human beings :-)

I feel for Twitter. They are using the right framework (RoR), good hardware (Sun), but the database seems problematic (mySQL).

But that can be a red herring, even Oracle can crawl to a halt if the application or hardware is not playing ball.

Ankit

Eagle eye ;)

Andrew

Hmm... That explains it. And here I've tried over 30 times to upload a picture to my profile and kept receiving that message. Get your act together, silly birds.

Viral Marketer

My goodness I've been trying to load a profile pic for weeks and it just won't let me... At least I'm getting a tweet in here and there.

Mike Zume

Great write! Thanks for the info. This is still going on 2-5-09 at 13:05.

Infopreneur

Twitter is a bloody disgrace.

loveanpeace4eva

lol I had to reread that and look at the picture again to get that joke. Just got that 404 when I tried to change my picture on there :)

Carlos

Server overloaded? I don't think so, this is just a plan to get the ball rolling and they may be thinking in charging or even limiting tweets per day and maybe offer a plus account option that lets you post unlimited tweets. internet is a business and you have to stay alive somehow.

nove

maby they should let TOM fix it LOL this made me mad well back to posting my status on myspace

higinio gonzalez

He's right. The twitter page is like a bird(light)What twitter needs now is a whale(big)It's presently top-heavy so it falls.Unfortunately it can't be fixed.Once you build a page its done.You have to build a brand new one.And what a page it will be !Wait till you see.Happy hunting.Heigh-ho !

Suzanne

Andddd it's down again. Oh, and it's 50% of the birds who are wreaking havoc. Although, it is unclear which 50%. Four one way, four the other, and a possibly stoned whale dangling over....red waves? Fly, birdies, fly!!!