Twitter is growing at a huge pace in the past few months. People are using it both from their phones and website but also from external applications that are putting HUGE demands on their backend.

The Technology Twitter is using Rails and Amazon’s Backend Cloud Computing doesn’t seem to have the ability to serv users even during what would normally be considered low load times.

Having a large amount of work to deal with over the past 5 days overnight hours have become normal. During this time there was no recovery time noticed on Twitter.

Yes US Daytime load makes the site almost unusable but anyone that has access to server logs knows that overnight hours especially Early Monday Mornings 01:00 est to 06:00 am est are the slowest times of the week.

Surely with Amazon providing backend processing this time of day should allow the site to function normally or at least return some data without delay.

This does not seem to be the case. All day every day 24/7 Twitter is Failing.

So, what is the solution before users start to walk away?

Well that must be keeping Twitter developers up as much as our own work but the thing is you can not cut back on functionality especially if the site has such limited function in the first place.

140 characters and a limit of 2000 follows for basic accounts is not much to provide even when you have millions of users. When compared to other sites that offer full Blogs to hundreds of millions of users or larger profiles with  cross checking the same way Twitter does with follow updates it seems something in the core is wrong.

Will Twitter survive?

Hard to say but maybe not if they can’t scale effectively.

Other developers are more then willing to take their place and will.