I see a lot of comments here assuming that this proves something about Twitter being inefficient. Before you jump to conclusions, take a look at the author’s code: https://github.com/trishume/twitterperf
Notably absent are things like serving HTTP, not to even mention HTTPS. This was a fun exercise in algorithms, I/O, and benchmarking. It wasn’t actually imitating anything that resembles actual Twitter or even a usable website.
Which I think I'm perfectly clear about in the blog post. The post is mostly about napkin math systems analysis, which does cover HTTP and HTTPS.
I'm now somewhat confident I could implement this if I tried, but it would take many years, the prototype and math is to check whether there's anything that would stop me if I tried and be a fun blog post about what systems are capable of.
I've worked on a team building a system to handle millions of messages per second per machine, and spending weeks doing math and building performance prototypes like this is exactly what we did before we built it for real.
I see a lot of comments here assuming that this proves something about Twitter being inefficient. Before you jump to conclusions, take a look at the author’s code: https://github.com/trishume/twitterperf
Notably absent are things like serving HTTP, not to even mention HTTPS. This was a fun exercise in algorithms, I/O, and benchmarking. It wasn’t actually imitating anything that resembles actual Twitter or even a usable website.