Popular people with long lists of followers on Twitter may be partly responsible for the micro-blogging site's performance woes at times.
Twitter serves as a messaging service these days, above and beyond what its creators imagined their experiment in one-to-many SMS messaging would become. As fans of Twitter, but lately its up and down availability made it difficult to drop an update to those who follow us on the service.
Twitter developer Alex Payne talked about the issues in a post at the Twitter Technology blog. He answered several questions posed by users of the site about its development and related issues.
In one response, Payne noted how a certain group of users may be the people responsible for some of Twitter's growing pains:
The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when "popular" users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they're following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that's behavior we have to limit on our side.
We're painfully aware of every minute that we're slow or unavailable.
Improving performance will mean a lot of ongoing development work, tracking down issues with various diagnostic tools and generally exploring how people use Twitter. Its utility and ease of use lifted Twitter from being just another cute project to a highly useful service, something we hope continues to improve.
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Sorry, but
I didn't bother to read past the first sentence. How about looking at the proliferation of "bots" and "spammers" that follow upwards of 20,000 people, pull in that data, parse it, and then spam it out as "tweets". You will find that for every Scobleizer there are 20 or 30 bots that find 200-300 people per minute to follow.
I think that the whole idea of the USERS being the problems is asinine. I think they should find a way to limit bots and their drag on performance. And i've tweeted about it before .. Is this artificially created to show our new (or existing) dependence on Twitter, and garner a revenue stream? If we find we "need" it ... will they get us to pay for it? Likely not, we'll move on to the next thing.