On Tuesday, we asked 'what's up with the Twitter glitches', fearing the site could be about to sink back to the dark, fail whaley days of June. But last night, the site announced it will be opening its own data centre this autumn, following on from hints about 'long-term solutions' and a mention at a conference by an engineer in April.
"The short story is that we've been working hard to deal with Twitter's performance issues, investing in long-term solutions to the challenges we face from our ongoing growth in users + activity," Twitter's spokesman Matt Graves told us. "One of the things announced today was that we're opening our own data center later this year. This is something we've been quietly working on for months, well before the World Cup-related burst in traffic, and it's an example of the kind of long-term solutions we're working to implement."
Photo by Rosaura Ochoa on Flickr. Some rights reserved
Twitter's engineering blog posted a detailed explanation of the technical problems and what they've been doing to fix them, along with another charming analogy of what it's like maintaining Twitter: "We frequently compare the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight."
"On Monday, our users database, where we store millions of user records, got hung up running a long-running query; as a result, most of the table became locked. The locked users table manifested itself in many ways: users were unable to sign-up, sign in, update their profile or background images, and responses from the API were malformed, rendering the response unusable to many of the API clients. In the end, this affected most of the Twitter ecosystem: our mobile, desktop, and web-based clients, the Twitter support and help system, and Twitter.com."
Sorting that out basically took a while. But longer term, a new data centre near Salt Lake City will give Twitter more control over the systems that allow 300,000 new signups every day, give room for growth and activity. "Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change," says Twitter's engineering blog.
Like Facebook's 500 million user milestone, opening your own data centre is an important landmark for web companies who need to move beyond the cheap, convenient and flexible cloud-based services to something more bespoke and , in the case of Twitter, more speed. Facebook announced its own in January this year.
