Dear Twitter, Uptime Does Not Equal Error-Free Fun Time
June 10th, 2008
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%.
And yet, I can’t tell you how many times I saw the damn Whale while trying to use Twitter yesterday during the WWDC keynote. I’m not a Twitter hater, but I’d like to see them not boast about their uptime stats as a sole success metric. After all, up and serving error pages is not the same as up and serving a usable application.
Whoops! Proving that I myself am not error-free, I went back and re-read their post before saving this one…turns out the Whale was served 4% of the time during the peak load:
About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.
Dodged that bullet.
On a slightly related note: Save the whales!.