Using Metrics to Vanquish the Fail Whale

Data Center Knowledge (Jun 23 2009)

1. Few prominent web sites have failed more often and under closer scrutiny than Twitter. But over the past year the microblogging service has rehabilitated its reputation, improving its uptime even as its traffic has grown phenomenally. That torrid growth continues, despite reports to the contrary based on ComScore data, according to John Adams of Twitter’s operations team, who spoke this morning at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in San Jose. “There are a lot of reports that our growth is slowing down,” said Adams. “I can’t say what the real numbers are. But it’s just not slowing down at all. All that traffic has led to an insane amount of pain.” Measuring and analyzing performance data has been the primary weapon in Twitter’s ongoing effort to vanquish the “Fail Whale” - the downtime mascot that appears whenever Twitter is unavailable. “You really want to instrument everything you ... (Read Full Article)

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