Jens Alfke on Twitter, Rails, and SQL as the ‘Universal Hammer’

I think the whole “11,000 requests per second” thing with Twitter is a myth. I mean, I know they’re growing like crazy and the server is busy as hell, but my (admittedly only somewhat informed) guess is that they do a few hundred connections per second, tops. Maybe things get backed up to the point where there are 10,000 active connections, but not thousands of new connections per second.

★ Thursday, 19 April 2007