Still More Downtime Drama For Twitter

When it comes to downtime, there’s no place to hide these days. The Internet notices when a popular web site experiences outages or performance problems, and in recent days the blogs have been noticing (again) the seemingly endless ^[1] scalability ^[2] problems ^[3] at Twitter. Rather than a full-blown outage, the microblogging service has been mysteriously dropping tweets ^[4], which brought commentary from popular ^[5] bloggers ^[6] wondering what happened to their 140-character messages. Twitter’s Biz Stone blamed the problems on the deployment of a new Memcached implementation ^[7].

The drama has now focused on the departure of Blaine Cook ^[8], the lead architect at Twitter. Cook’s exit has quickly become a hot topic at TechCrunch ^[9] and Valleywag ^[10].

“I can’t think of a more pressure packed job than being responsible for the scaling of Twitter, a service that has continuously struggled to keep up with its growing user base,” wrote Adam Ostrow at Mashable ^[11], who wondered aloud if Cook was being scapegoated.

Keep in mind that there many folks (including us ^[2]) who wondered whether Joyent was part of Twitter’s problem. But Twitter stopped using Joyent’s services ^[12] in January, and the performance problems have persisted.

This week Twitter hired a new architect ^[13] and web engineer. Looking ahead, Bob Warfield at Smoothspan ^[14] emphasized that Twitter has yet another chance to establish stability. “What follows next is important,” Bob writes. “The new gang has a limited window in which to fix the problem. This won’t be easy. Fixing deep architecture issues on a live system that can’t keep up is one of those nightmare scenarios that’s painful beyond belief.”

UPDATE: Silicon Alley Insider ^[15] now reports that Lee Mighdoll, who was brought on in early January as Twitter’s VP of engineering and operations, is also out.

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URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/04/23/still-more-downtime-drama-for-twitter/

URLs in this post:

[1] endless: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/15/jobs_macworld_keynote_silences_twitter.html

[2] scalability: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/31/twitter_touts_joyent_amid_more_outages.html

[3] problems: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Dec/19/six_days_of_downtime_for_twitter_in_2007.html

[4] dropping tweets: http://www.parislemon.com/2008/04/if-twitter-breaks-in-woods-and-no-one.html

[5] popular: http://scobleizer.com/2008/04/21/twitter-grabbing-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-success/

[6] bloggers: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/04/21/theTwitterOutagePersists.html

[7] Memcached implementation: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/04/weekend-web-weirdness.html

[8] departure of Blaine Cook: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/lead_architect_blaine_cook_out_at_twitter

[9] TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/amateur-hour-over-at-twitter/

[10] Valleywag: http://valleywag.com/383002/lead-architect-quits-twitter-wisely-flees-the-country

[11] Mashable: http://mashable.com/2008/04/23/twitter-lead-architect-resigns/

[12] stopped using Joyent’s services: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/31/hasty_divorce_for_twitter_joyent.html

[13] hired a new architect: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/04/welcome-john-and-steve.html

[14] Smoothspan: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/bug-or-architecture-flaw-fail-or-no-fail/

[15] Silicon Alley Insider: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/twitter_turmoil_not_finished_engineering_vp_lee_mighdoll_out_too

[16] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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