50 million Tweets per day, WOW!

Gazza · #1 24th February 2010, 01:07 PM

Twitter has only been around for a couple of years but there is no doubting that the early detractors jumped the wrong way! Last year the number of tweets grew by some 1400% to 35 million per day. So far this year daily totals have been at the 50 million mark, or 600 tweets per second!! These figures published by Twitter DO NOT include tweets from spam accounts.

From amongst the people I follow there are very few of the, "I'm waiting at the bus stop," "Just brushed my teeth," tweets, although the occasional appearance of such tweets actually gives some humorous balance to the rather esoteric nature of the topics covered in my forays onto the Twittershere.

There can be no argument that there are now heaps of businesses making use of this platform to reach out to not only their customers but also their staff - Twitter is certainly an instant and accessible communicator.

It will take a while yet to reach the traffic level generated by the FaceBook fraternity but 600 tweets per second is a fair sort of volume to be handled by the Twitter servers. So far there have been very few non-scheduled outages and/or slowdowns so the Twitter organisation is to be congratulated for the way they have handled the technical aspects. I'm forever hearing about the frustration experienced by FaceBook users because of slow response within their site.

MacDavo · #2 24th February 2010, 02:58 PM

By my calculations, that's about 7GB per day. Maybe 6.5GB if you take an average.

That would generate about 200GB/month. You could do that with a couple of load balanced servers. It still begs the question how they're paying for it. There server bill is maybe $24,000.00/pa, and I'm taking a wild top of my head guess here.

In the grand scheme of things, if you have reasonable VC, that's not heaps. If I was inclined to google it, I'd no doubt find my answer.

clinton1550 · #3 24th February 2010, 06:20 PM

50 million tweets per day, a number like that is a little hard to get your head around. I've never seen one million of anything so I don't have a yard stick. Even 600 tweets per second is a little hard to appreciate. But when those numbers are expressed in data transfer, I start to get a sense of the huge scale involved. 7 GB of data per day and that's just tweets, it's not taking into account the amount of visits and API calls that are made. Twitter is shifting a huge amount of data.

Or to put it another way, if Twitter made one dollar per tweet, they could buy 18,525 MacBook Pros and still have a bit left over at the end of the day.

MichaelQ · #4 25th February 2010, 02:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MacDavo

That would generate about 200GB/month. You could do that with a couple of load balanced servers. It still begs the question how they're paying for it. There server bill is maybe $24,000.00/pa, and I'm taking a wild top of my head guess here.

How do you get $24k pa from 200Gb / month???

Their not using NextG for it.

Looking at my server host, $50 a month buys you 500Gb in traffic per month. At the top end $350 gets you 10,000Gb/month. And these guys are by no means the cheapest (just the best imo)

Interwebs are cheap.

MichaelQ · #5 25th February 2010, 02:46 AM

Also…

$24,000 is probably what they make running ads on twitter.jp and many other tld Twitter sites that carry ads.

MacDavo · #6 25th February 2010, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelQ

How do you get $24k pa from 200Gb / month???

A reasonable Rackspace server is about $500/month with 2TB bandwidth, so it's not about the bandwidth.
They'd have a load balanced solution to cope with the traffic, in particular their web traffic. That would be a lot higher than the tweet traffic, but I'm guessing they have a single server or more for that.

So I'm guessing a moderate size rig with load balancing would be 4 pizza boxes- though that is a wild guess and probably underestimated. So $2K/month x 12 = $24K.

Don't you love wild speculation

MichaelQ · #7 25th February 2010, 01:32 PM

Actually from memory its all done via Amazon S3 - they don't own servers at all.

Someone did do the calculations once and it turned out pretty dirt cheap for them to run in terms of bandwidth. Nothing compared to the Lunch Bill of the Engineers running the show.

MacDavo · #8 25th February 2010, 06:54 PM

Amazon sure know how to confuse the hell out of what should be a very simple concept. Have you seen their pricing models?!

Selling compute and storage separately does make sense, given they're two separate virtualised systems. None the less, when it comes to compute, I think most people still tend to think in traditional terms. CPU and RAM.

You're not wrong about the lunches.