How twitter works

Posted on December 16, 2010 in Tutorials

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The data in this post goes back to June 2009 aka almost 6 months

I have been long amazed by twitter architecture as a coder – so i was digging around on technical details on how it works and the size of their infrastructure and such.

I tweeted the links I found – now @vipwoody asked again if i still have the info – so i thought about sharing in post as a self-documentation and for the rest who could be interested.

Reference 1 :

Presentation of Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter

Improving Running Components at Twitter

View more presentations from Evan Weaver.

In case you are wondering – this is Evan -  cool dude

• Most of the tools used by Twitter are open source.
• Everything is kept in RAM and the database is just a backup.
• The stack is made up of Rails for the front side, C, Scala and Java for the middle business layer, and MySQL for storing data
• The front end mostly glues together several client services, many written in C: MySQL client, Memcached client, a JSON one, and others.
• The middleware uses Memcached, Varnish for page caching, Kestrel, a MQ written in Scala, and a Comet server is in the works, also written in Scala and used for clients that want to track a large number of tweets.

Here are also some pictures of the new Twitter offices : http://abduzeedo.com/new-twitter-office-headquarter

Detailed tech description : http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/Twitter-Architecture