Twitter Scores New Tweets-Per-Second Record With 143,000 Peak

Twitter's tweets-per-second numbers are usually fairly stable, with spikes happening here and there to varying degrees depending on what is trending and happening in the real world. On August 3, however, it had an unusually high per-second tweet peak – so high, in fact, that it set a new record for the social network. Now Twitter has posed the details on what happened complete with some bragging about its user experience.

The flood of tweets originated from Japan during a showing of Castle in the Sky, with viewers so enthused about what they were watching that tweets reached a sort of rapid crescendo, peaking out at 143,199 in a single second. This is in contrast to the average per-second rate the microblogging website sees of 5,700.

Users wouldn't have noticed the rapid influx of tweets, however, says Twitter, because the site didn't "blip" at all. This has been its goal, it said in an announcement, something it thought it wouldn't achieve at times when overload would take the service down for some users. One such case was back during the 2010 World Cup, with the mass amounts of tweets rolling in eventually causing temporary outages.

Learning from this experience, Twitter worked to "implement order-of-magnitudes of efficiency gains," only to see such efforts have little effect due to the number of users who were joining the service. This eventually spawned a new architecture, and the company now has flexibility for new implementation that it didn't have before, on top of the stability changes.

New Year's Eve, the Super Bowl, or other similar events – the company says it can handle them, and do so smoothly. For those interested in the fine details, Twitter breaks its process down into discussions on coding and different issues learned during its revamping process, which you can check out for yourself at the link below.

SOURCE: Twitter