Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what's causing problems in a web site like Twitter. But over time we have learned some techniques that help us to solve the variety of problems that occur in our complex web site.A few weeks ago, we noticed something unusual: over 100 visitors to Twitter per second saw what is popularly known as "the fail whale". Normally these whales are rare; 100 per second was cause for alarm. Although even 100 per second is a very small fraction of our overall traffic, it still means that a lot of users had a bad experience when visiting the site. So we mobilized a team to find out the cause of the problem.


