Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged twitter, rails

Filters: twitter × rails × Sorted by date


Why did Twitter have so many problems if it is made with Ruby?

The technical problem Twitter solves (distributing millions of short messages per minute to an enormous graph of follow relationships) is extremely hard in any language.

[... 44 words]

cache-money. A “write-through caching library for ActiveRecord”, maintained by Nick Kallen from Twitter. Queries hit memcached first, and caches are automatically kept up-to-date when objects are created, updated and deleted. Only some queries are supported—joins and comparisons won’t hit the cache, for example. # 28th June 2009, 3:17 pm

Twitter, or Architecture Will Not Save You. Kellan is not an armchair architect. He also doesn’t mention Rails once. Well worth reading. # 29th May 2008, 1:16 am

identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin. # 4th October 2007, 2:53 pm

SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome. I’m beginning to think that for scalable applications the thinner your ORM is the better—if you even use one at all. # 22nd June 2007, 12:40 am

In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.

Tim Bray # 14th April 2007, 9:13 am

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.

Alex Payne, Twitter # 12th April 2007, 2:51 pm