Technology
Twitter Survives Election after the Move from Ruby-to-Java
Twitter usage was high due to US presidential election; it experienced a record traffic after the result of the election was announced on Tuesday night, but its service didn’t suffer any outage due to sudden increase in load and Twitter engineers give credit to their latest move to Java from good old Ruby. They say Java was completely responsible enough for backing up the software, and preventing outages.
The Vice President of Twitter’s infrastructure operations engineering, Mazen Rawashdeh said users posted nearly 10,000 messages every second from 8 to 9pm. At 8.20 pm, users generated 15,107 messages and during the peak time of that night, they produced 874,560 new posts in a minute. He said such high numbers were unusual to the micro blogging site and it clearly shows the evolution and how people have started to use Twitter.
Earlier, it had faced unexpectedly high traffic period to particular occasions, like New Year’s Eve or timely sports events, but this was the first time that such a heavy traffic load lasted for a sustained period. He also said it’s the highest amount of traffic generated during an election since the site was established.
In the past few years, users might have faced some issues when the server loaded heavily. Earlier, service outages or blocks were so common that Twitter’s unusual ‘fail’ error display became an icon for the Web 2.0 users. However, this time, users didn’t experience any problems and they could post, share, or follow each other on Tuesday night’s election result time. Mazen said it could happen due to the company’s ongoing migration from Ruby to Java. He attributed the credit to Java built on completely new framework, Java Virtual Machine.
The company first started stepping away from Ruby four years back, when its Ruby-based message system hit a wall. Alex Payne, former Twitter developer said Ruby is at its best, but can’t be the long running process. Twitter engineers’ solution was to combine some of the Ruby codes to a new platform and initially its development team avoided Java for Scala language as it combines functional and object-oriented programming. Today, its software is designed from a merge of ordinary Java and Scala code.
Few services of Twitter still operate on Ruby, but are used less often. Rawashdeh said that the company has reconfigured its services that traffic from cell phone devices never reached Ruby-based software. The highly optimized version of the Java script is designed to manage more efficiently during heavy traffic.
Business
Top 3 Gainers: Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), Eros International (NYSE:EROS), Borqs Technologies’ (BRQS)
