Twitter suffers minor period of uptime overnight
Cory Bergman June 6th, 2008
I stole that headline from Techcrunch. Twitter has suffered two major database failures over the last couple days — the lastest in a string of technology failures due in part to its ever increasing popularity.
By the way, Amazon.com was down for a couple hours today.
3 Comments Add your own
1. tdc | June 6th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
i don’t care if you stole the headline… it’s still funny as hell.
and true.
2. Amanda E. | June 6th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Twitter’s problem is that they are using three MySQL databases for the backend and having hundred of thousands of read/writes every second to those databases - its no small wonder their DB’s throw up constantly. A lot of their problems from what I’ve gathered online is that people sign up and then go and “friend” everyone else on Twitter and people sending hundreds of updates every minute.
MySQL was never designed for that kind of load, and while I am a big promoter of using open source solutions whenever one can, there comes a time where you have to throw in the towel and start looking at commercial database systems such as Oracle or MS SQL that can support the size of I/O load their site generates. And they have around $5 million in venture funding from what I’ve last heard, so they do have the cash to invest in a new database system.
On an off-topic note from the last Twitter discussion - for the WorldNow folks on this site, email me at amanda dot emily at gmail dot com. I have a site setup for a somewhat of a “support group”. Even I have questions on WorldNow’s limitations for web projects I am developing for a WorldNow site.
3. me! | June 8th, 2008 at 9:30 am
i don’t mind if twitter is down, but amazon? that’s not good!
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