Growing woes

//blog.twitter.com/2008/05/i-have-this-graph….i made the comment today that it’s becoming routine that Twitter kicks the can. It would be news, if the site didn’t hiccup for a week or two straight.On the other hand, I appreciate the diligence of the Twitter engineers for providing a fantastic and free service to the masses.It reminds me of Yahoo! Answers’ first slam dunk that brought the house down. Marketing had either spammed the wild world of Y! about or front-page-linked to the first Answers celebrity promotion featuring Donald Trump.It came out of the blue. Everything flatlined. 4 front-end boxes just said, “fuck it, you don’t pay me enough.” The quick-and-dirty patch had been to statically link the Don’s question to a static fileonly the first 30 answers are displayed in the initial view (pagination for extended views). Later on, less short-term solutions involved caching view fragments and dropping extra-hardware bombs.If you could qualify anything about Web 2.0, it’s that webapps have evolved since the dotcom days. It’s not just another shopping cart site, and that reading, storing and continuously updating relational data (and not necessarily using a RDBMS) is a 24/7 job and an architectural challenge.