I know hundreds of keen Twitter users. We’ve been there since the start, and loved it all the way. However, it seems that now the huge media boom surrounding it, and other social networking systems, it’s struggling to keep up. Constantly being bombarded with excuses, errors and more does not help its user-count.

It’s a classic case of the developers doing the business-man’s job. Having received over $80 million in funding, and still unable to afford scalable servers is quite frankly a scare.

Twitter’s always been built on Ruby, from the start, but, as the web developers know, Ruby/Rails was never designed to scale to such huge numbers. Even Twitter themselves know that! The question is, why are they refusing to rewrite? Ruby/Rails isn’t the only AJAX-enabled engine in the world, and it wouldn’t be hard to rewrite.

It’s not just the technology. There’s been a huge row between users recently, when Twitter allegedly refused to uphold their own Terms of Use, for fear of legal issues (considering there could have been a legal issue from either party). Link.

Solutions

1. Rewrite. This is the most obvious way out of this mess. They could switch to a more stable environment. Obvious? Apparently not. There are reasons why a rewrite is impractical in the short term.
2. Local servers. Having a central (Ruby) server clearly isn’t working. Why don’t they do what all other international platforms do, which is to hold a data bank, that one server per continent takes data from, periodically? This will speed up access time, and reduce server load 10 (-ish) fold.
3. More servers. They can afford it! A simple upgrade of machines would go a great deal further than constant errors.
4. Restrict use. Oh my goodness. They’re on the verge of this already. They’re already shutting down features on a temporary basis. You may be thinking, "oh no, how can we live without pagination?" in a semi-sarcastic manner, but you may not have noticed the 30 refreshes/hour limit on the API. This is not a solution, Twitter.

Anyway, what’s your take on this? Have you got any more solutions? Edit: Those that don’t involve (that much) violence, thank you commenters.

P.S. http://www.twitter.com/lawrencejob