http://disqus.com/by/akirkpatrick/enSun, 25 May 2008 18:58:15 -0000http://www.hurricanesoftwares.com/2008/05/23/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/#comment-528544<p>Twitter mainly uses Ruby for the web front-end. All that back-end critical path stuff is handled by code written in faster languages such as C. This was revealed some weeks ago when there was speculation they'd be dropping RoR.</p><p>Google has the luxury of benefiting from a lot of ranking/correlation happening in 'offline' batch runs. This makes the 'online' interactive search code faster to execute. You're right that Twitter's problem is going to need a change in approach for them.</p><p>Possibly like what Google does, a way of cementing/optimizing the expected data flows in batch jobs, so when you tweet most of your followers can be reached faster.</p><p>As others have speculated, there may be no good way to make an N^2 network scale without opening it up and making it distributed like jabber/email/www.</p>akirkpatrickSun, 25 May 2008 18:58:15 -0000