Also, totally unrelated Twitter story (because I am nostalgic lately and you reminded me of it)
Early in my time there we had a major, unexpected load spike in the middle of the day. People where tweeting like crazy, breaking records for volume, etc. The system was groaning under strain but it mostly held. Turns out Michael Jackson had died. We sustained 452 (or maybe 457, it was roughly 450-something) tweets a second. this quickly became 1 "MJ" worth of tweets. We informally used this to define load the entire time I was there. Within a few months we got to a point where we were never BELOW 1 MJ, within a year I think we had peaked at double digit MJs and sustained several even in the lowest periods. Before I left we had hit 1 MJ in photo tweets, etc.
Around the time I left we did something like 300 MJ's per second, and I was only there 3 years.
I remember those days before snowflake and Blaine was desperately trying to keep the lights on. It's why no one had time to talk to us (marketers and related disciplines) back then. Even Facebook said "all our focus is on acquiring users. You have no choice but to meet us on our terms because we own the eyeballs." Everything was growing so fast. Hard to believe that was only a decade ago.
Musk claimed a record of 20,000 of tweets per second recently [1]. How does that square with what you’re saying? 300 times 450 is closer to 150,000. Am I missing something?
That's interesting; I worked on a different site that also got record traffic when MJ died. I wonder if that happened to every site that had a chat or news feature.
Kind of obvious now, but I bet we could detect major world news just by sampling traffic size of chat sites.
Early in my time there we had a major, unexpected load spike in the middle of the day. People where tweeting like crazy, breaking records for volume, etc. The system was groaning under strain but it mostly held. Turns out Michael Jackson had died. We sustained 452 (or maybe 457, it was roughly 450-something) tweets a second. this quickly became 1 "MJ" worth of tweets. We informally used this to define load the entire time I was there. Within a few months we got to a point where we were never BELOW 1 MJ, within a year I think we had peaked at double digit MJs and sustained several even in the lowest periods. Before I left we had hit 1 MJ in photo tweets, etc.
Around the time I left we did something like 300 MJ's per second, and I was only there 3 years.