The Twitter Engineering Blog

Information from Twitter's engineering team about our technology, tools and events.

Results from Engineering forJuly 2010

Twitter & Performance: An update

On Monday, a fault in the database that stores Twitter user records caused problems on both Twitter.com and our API. The short, non-technical explanation is that a mistake led to some problems that we were able to fix without losing any data.Read more…

Room to grow: a Twitter data center

Later this year, Twitter is moving our technical operations infrastructure into a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area. We’re excited about the move for several reasons.Read more…

Murder: Fast datacenter code deploys using BitTorrent

Twitter has thousands of servers. What makes having boatloads of servers particularly annoying though is that we need to quickly get multiple iterations of code and binaries onto all of them on a regular basis. We used to have a git-based deploy system where we’d just instruct our front-ends to download the latest code from our main git machine and serve that. Unfortunately, once we got past a few hundred servers, things got ugly.Read more…

Cassandra at Twitter Today

In the past year, we’ve been working with the Apache Cassandra open source distributed database. Much of our work there has been out in the open, since we’re big proponents of open source software. Unfortunately, lately we’ve been less involved in the community because of more pressing concerns and have created some misunderstandings.Read more…