Twitter is UDP

Someone asked me if Twitter was TCP or UDP. UDP, it’s definately UDP. I can’t talk about the numbers, but UDP.

– Blaine Cook

Scaling Twitter talk at 2nd Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference

Blaine talked about dealing with traffic on the busiest Rails based site. His comment was related to their use of DRB and Rinda, a distributed object system for ruby, basically RMI. Apparently Twitter has been getting so much traffic at times that there’s no way it’s going to catch up, so the solution was to just drop the queue when it got too big since it wasn’t going to catch up anyway. A purely pragmatic approach for a very popular site experiencing growing pains.

(The conference was pretty great and I’ll probably be culling posts from my notes for the next week or so. The slides from Blaine Cook’s talk can be found on Slideshare.)