Tomorrow will be the start of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The anticipation for the keynote is high with the rumor-mill buzzing about the 3G iPhone being announced at the keynote and more recently, rumors that iChat is coming to Windows. With many ways to get live coverage of the keynote (and find out if the rumors are true), nothing seems to do the job better than Twitter. Yet will Twitter be prepared for the hammering that will follow?
Twitter Says Bring it On
Lately Twitter has had more than its fair share of downtime. For the past week the service has not been up to par. We’re just beginning the month of June, but Twitter has already experienced over an hour of downtime according to Pingdom reports. Tomorrow the service is expecting 10 times their normally traffic during the WWDC. Everyone’s wondering if they’ll be able to handle it. Twitter is answering back with a resounding yes. According to a recent post on the Twitter blog, there’s a plan A and a plan B.
Plan A
“We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency. This work is in intended to help handle the load and keep Twitter up and running while Steve Jobs talks about all the new products and services Apple has planned. Of course these improvements will continue to serve Twitter beyond the WWDC as well.”
Plan B
“In the event that our estimates and preparations fail, we have designed a way to keep Twitter updates moving quickly through the system to their respective recipients. We have isolated and created on/off switches for many Twitter features. Should it become necessary to shed incoming load quickly, we can turn off features such as stats, pagination, and several others to preserve the reliability and timeliness of your Twitter timeline.”
Personal Backup Plan
While there’s plenty of hope that Twitter will pull through, some promises are just dying to be broken. In the event that Twitter does sustain a dramatic length of downtime and you just can’t wait another minute for an update, you can head over to an alternative service. I’d recommend heading over to FriendFeed or even the up-and-coming Plurk to keep up with the keynote updates. On FriendFeed, there are severalroomsdedicated to keeping users up-to-date. In the meantime, I wish Twitter the best and hope they will make good on their promise.
