Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

I read (yet) another post about Twitter’s performance problems, but this one unlike others shined light onto the technical difficulties that Twitter is facing. From the post it appears as though Twitter was created too rapidly with an underemphasis on performance. It’s very easy for software developers to be so interested in cranking out features that they disregard performance altogether. I think Twitter is one of these cases. Read the post for more details, but basically they were naive when developing their application and didn’t dig deep into performance bottlenecks and limitations.

Let this be a lesson that performance must be a factor when developing an application. Consider what will happen to your code if you experience an insane amount of usage, and understand the performance bottlenecks that you’ll have. Google is a good counterexample to Twitter. Larry and Sergey knew how difficult it would be to create a fast index of the internet, so they developed tools to deal with large data. I’ll bet the developers at Twitter are running around like maniacs, profiling, testing, and screaming profanities. Had they taken performance into account earlier they could have avoided their recent downtime altogether or at least been more prepared to fix the problem when it occurred.