Twitter+Apple!

Tomorrow is the much anticipated Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference and there's going to be some very interesting breaking-news happening on Twitter. During the event, we are expecting approximately ten times our normal daily traffic so we've made some plans to accommodate this dramatic surge.

Throwing Some Weight Around

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.

Operation: Gray Mode

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.

And One More Thing

Finally, we've learned about a cool way for news-hungry Apple fans who want to keep track of the announcements they care about most in real time. The folks over at Summize are tracking the WWDC. There's a link in the Twitter home page so you can follow every Apple-related tweet coming out of the conferenced and keynote.