← All IntelClip / AI ToolsWhy Twitter's scaling problem was genuinely hard
From Vibe Coding Is The Future · ≈26:25
A nuanced postmortem comparing Facebook's smooth load to Twitter's spiky feed fan-out and its broken queue tooling — a caution against attributing scaling failures purely to sloppy zero-to-one code.
What’s in it
- A nuanced postmortem comparing Facebook's smooth load to Twitter's spiky feed fan-out and its broken queue tooling — a caution against attributing scaling failures purely to sloppy zero-to-one code.
Clip transcript
kind of goes back to to link up what we were saying earlier it goes back to hiring I mean I I keep thinking about the Twitter analogy that you brought up CU I think it's a really interesting one like if you if you compare Facebook and Twitter in both cases they went very quickly from zero to one in sort of Scrappy moast break things way um Facebook was able to solve the scaling technical challenges in a pretty impressive way I think most people would would agree I mean Mark Zuckerberg was by far way more technical way more in the weeds probably maybe but I I don't know like I think Twitter scalability challenges were also harder based on the usage patterns like the thing about the usage of Facebook is that it grows like it's pretty smooth throughout the day like people just use it all the time the problem with Twitter is that the usage is incredibly spiky you get like a super bowl or like a you know like like a world event and all of a sudden you have like 10 times as much usage the way the fan out of the feed works is I think like fundamentally a very difficult computer science problem okay that's fair though I also think that they were like really hamstrung by their tools do you remember using this terrible Q system called Starling AB I used it because I thought oh Twitter's so much bigger than us they're so smart they wouldn't use something that's crap no they totally use crap and then I use crap and I couldn't make it work it was like it was dropping jobs on the floor like it's like all these crazy bugs happened and then I was like finally I was like I'm not using that anymore I have to switch to rabbit mq or whatever the heck the the the actually correct thing to use was yeah and and like Ruby is an incredibly slow language even like 10x slower than PHP which was already too slow so I don't know I mean basically you should be so lucky to get to one yeah is there an advantage for a
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