If we have done a good job then most of you shouldn’t have noticed that we launched a new backend for search on twitter.com during the last few weeks! One of our main goals, but also biggest challenges, was a smooth switch from the old architecture to the new one, without any downtime or inconsistencies in search results. Read on to find out what we changed and why.Read more…

The Twitter.com redesign presented an opportunity to make bold changes to the underlying technology of the website. With this in mind, we began implementing a new architecture almost entirely in JavaScript. We put special emphasis on ease of development, extensibility, and performance. Building the application on the client forced us to come up with unique solutions to bring our product to life, a few of which we’d like to highlight in this overview.Read more…

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…

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…