Twitter Adds More Adjustments
Posted by on July 26th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media |
Being one of the most popular social networking websites in the web today, Twitter has already established its influence in our world today. Millions of people log into their Twitter accounts everyday for a variety of reasons. Most people do it to catch up with friends and stay connected wherever they may be. Twitter is also one of the world’s strongest tools for social media. News and current events from all over the world can be tweeted and accessed by anyone.
Adjustments Needed
Being the leader in its industry, Twitter has made a lot of adjustments since it first started operating. To accommodate their consistently increasing customer base, the company has constantly been making regular updates with their servers to avoid an interruption in the so-called “Twitterverse.”
Just this week, Twitter users experienced more downtime as the technical team of Twitter fixed some hang-ups on the site’s database. This has affected not only Twitter.com but also the company’s API which meant that users outside the Twitter homepage were also unable to access their accounts. The downtime was mainly attributed to the long-running problem of Twitter being unable to keep up with its fast-growing user base.
The last World Cup exposed Twitter to a variety of technical failures it never knew would happen. Jean Paul Cozzatti, a Twitter engineer, says that the company’s network was improperly configured and Twitter has since doubled its efforts in order to make sure the World Cup incident does not happen again.
Steps by the Company
Improvements were consistently made but as this week’s downtime again proved, there are still more things to improve on for Twitter. The user growth and demand for their service just continues to grow and Cozzatti adds that the company is more than happy to cope up with their growing user population. Last April, it was reported that the website already has over 105 million users. As of the moment, this figure has grown over 124 million.
Several tweaks to the system have been made. This includes more than 50 performance adjustments, doubling the database for storing tweets, improving the app’s use of the memcache and adjusting the front and profile pages’ caching. This tweaks result in faster loading time and increased capacity for Twitter overall.
However, even if adjustments were being consistently made, Twitter still experiences things that are often beyond its control, like this week’s system downtime. Last Monday, the system was down for about 12 hours and engineers had to restart the whole Twitter system. This in turn disabled users from using their accounts, either to log-in or sign-up. Most of Twitter’s operations were halted because the downtime also affected those who use Twitter from their mobile and other devices.
Long-term Solutions
Twitter is planning to address all of these concerns and put in place solutions that will be there for the long-term. This fall, the company plans to set up a new data center and to hire more engineers to keep its system up and going. Though it is a problem that many companies will gladly have (user population growth), Twitter needs to put customer satisfaction first and make sure that their system down times are minimized.
The influence that it already has in the main stream population is enormous. Twitter sponsors continue to pour in their investments for the company. It is time for Twitter to show them that their investments are worth every penny.
