7 ms·

No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

64 points by swohns 12y ago

ggreer 12y ago
Twitter's engineering blog posted about this phenomenon last year.[1] It's not as in-depth as I'd like, but it does contain some technical/architectural details about how they scaled to deal with such high traffic. 1. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...
- ufmace 12y ago
  That's a far better description of what happened and the result than the original linked article.
kelukelugames 12y ago
This is fun localization issue. Kind of like water usage during World Cup games.
- wisty 12y ago
  And power - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
jgalt212 12y ago
Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no matches, so this might also be related. Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X. Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters = 140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized sentence.
- nandhp 12y ago
  I thought it would be about that too, but instead it was about punctuality.
- nrinaudo 12y ago
  Japanese is often encoded in Shift_JIS, which is much better than UTF-8 (for japanese text). Most browsers default to that encoding on japanese OSes, so there probably isn't a real bandwidth issue, depending on the ratio of browser to dedicated client usage. As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word - the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms. On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western words are used - western words are almost systematically written with katakanas. Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.
  - FreezerburnV 12y ago
    I know it's such a tiny point, and very much off topic, but please don't "pluralize" words such as Kanji, Katakana, etc. As someone who has spent a lot of time learning Japanese, and who knows that Japanese words don't change between singular/plural (with certain exceptions, such as attaching "-tachi" to a word), seeing you write "Kanjis" or "Katakanas" so many times in a row really bothers me. I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.
    - SunShiranui 12y ago
      Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as pizze?
      - w1ntermute 12y ago
        Actually, you're wrong. The plural of "kanji" in English is "kanji": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kanji http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kanji
josephschmoe 12y ago
"built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak" Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right? Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right? I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in" to technology. So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.
  - solarmist 12y ago
    That's my impression of Wired as well, but this still seems a bit egregious even for a layman's tech news site.
  - hawkw 12y ago
    I feel like Wired goes back and forth a lot - some of their articles (on a number of topics, not just computer-related) are pleasingly technical and I've really enjoyed them, and some feel really watered down. Probably, it depends on the individual writer.
- disillusioned 12y ago
  I remember reading a feature in Wired 10+ years ago about how processors were made that went into some quantum details and basically never stopped to take a breath. It was refreshing to see a publication simply assume you were smart enough to read, and thus smart enough to follow along (or look up the hard words yourself). I guess times have changed a bit.
- jcurbo 12y ago
  I had the same thought when I saw that and the line "Much of this is thanks to a sweeping effort to rebuild the site using a software programming technology called Scala". I had to double check that I was reading something on wired.com. It seems even more excessively watered down than usual.
ibisum 12y ago
The 'no downtime' thing really rings true with me .. during my personal time working in Japan I found I'd become accustomed to the fact that it was just 'normal' to be going into the office after a few beers and working another shift .. to the point where, when I returned to California, it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home and - except for a few hardcore hackers - life just seeped out of the office space(s) we called a workplace. I guess the different physical characteristics of the two locations has a lot to do with it, not to mention culture - back home (at the time) in California it was not at all weird to be spending up to two hours on the commute, just sitting on the freeways in ones car, completely alone tuned into whatever bland offerings the radio waves proferred, while in Japan I don't think I had a car-ride longer than 30 minutes the whole time I was there (airport lift) .. and there is something to be said for the vital 'energy' that imbues a place like Tokyo at 9pm in the evening on a Tuesday, where most of the world is still at work. Albeit drunk, at least in a good mood, but nevertheless: still working. I got used to heading out at 10pm on any workday and feeling really alive out there in the walking streets, like there wasn't a "shutdown" period before 12am. The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal that life was ..
- hvs 12y ago
  it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home I highly recommend it. It's called having a life.
  - ibisum 12y ago
    Saying that having a strong work ethos means 'not having a life' is about as derogatory as you can get without actually calling someone names .. whereas I found that the Japanese integration of work/home life really meant that there was more focus on really caring about what you were doing. Okay, there are exceptions, but I have to say that it was very clear to me that the two cultures have their own ways. It was considered just as 'degrading' not to be spending time with your co-workers in Japan .. which way is 'right'? This is clearly a cultural decision, and therefore: utterly arbitrary.
limaoscarjuliet 12y ago
I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)
- infruset 12y ago
  They come in to work and they do what? What service is it?
- rambojohnson 12y ago
  > they shout "HAI" hit login button. what?
- marak830 12y ago
  Hahaha. I live in japan and i can definatly agree with this!!!
philip1209 12y ago
I wonder whether concurrent write operations in a single data center or the load of achieving consistency between data centers caused more issues.
hawkw 12y ago
As a Scala enthusiast, it's neat to see one of my pet languages get press, but...a "software engineering technology called Scala"? Did you mean "programming language"?

64 points by swohns 12y ago

Twitter's engineering blog posted about this phenomenon last year.[1] It's not as in-depth as I'd like, but it does contain some technical/architectural details about how they scaled to deal with such high traffic. 1. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...

ufmace 12y ago
That's a far better description of what happened and the result than the original linked article.

kelukelugames 12y ago

This is fun localization issue. Kind of like water usage during World Cup games.

wisty 12y ago
And power - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

jgalt212 12y ago

Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no matches, so this might also be related. Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X. Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters = 140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized sentence.

nandhp 12y ago
I thought it would be about that too, but instead it was about punctuality.
nrinaudo 12y ago
Japanese is often encoded in Shift_JIS, which is much better than UTF-8 (for japanese text). Most browsers default to that encoding on japanese OSes, so there probably isn't a real bandwidth issue, depending on the ratio of browser to dedicated client usage. As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word - the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms. On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western words are used - western words are almost systematically written with katakanas. Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.
- FreezerburnV 12y ago
  I know it's such a tiny point, and very much off topic, but please don't "pluralize" words such as Kanji, Katakana, etc. As someone who has spent a lot of time learning Japanese, and who knows that Japanese words don't change between singular/plural (with certain exceptions, such as attaching "-tachi" to a word), seeing you write "Kanjis" or "Katakanas" so many times in a row really bothers me. I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.
  - SunShiranui 12y ago
    Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as pizze?
    - w1ntermute 12y ago
      Actually, you're wrong. The plural of "kanji" in English is "kanji": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kanji http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kanji

josephschmoe 12y ago

"built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak" Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right? Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right? I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in" to technology. So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.
- solarmist 12y ago
  That's my impression of Wired as well, but this still seems a bit egregious even for a layman's tech news site.
- hawkw 12y ago
  I feel like Wired goes back and forth a lot - some of their articles (on a number of topics, not just computer-related) are pleasingly technical and I've really enjoyed them, and some feel really watered down. Probably, it depends on the individual writer.
disillusioned 12y ago
I remember reading a feature in Wired 10+ years ago about how processors were made that went into some quantum details and basically never stopped to take a breath. It was refreshing to see a publication simply assume you were smart enough to read, and thus smart enough to follow along (or look up the hard words yourself). I guess times have changed a bit.
jcurbo 12y ago
I had the same thought when I saw that and the line "Much of this is thanks to a sweeping effort to rebuild the site using a software programming technology called Scala". I had to double check that I was reading something on wired.com. It seems even more excessively watered down than usual.

ibisum 12y ago

The 'no downtime' thing really rings true with me .. during my personal time working in Japan I found I'd become accustomed to the fact that it was just 'normal' to be going into the office after a few beers and working another shift .. to the point where, when I returned to California, it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home and - except for a few hardcore hackers - life just seeped out of the office space(s) we called a workplace. I guess the different physical characteristics of the two locations has a lot to do with it, not to mention culture - back home (at the time) in California it was not at all weird to be spending up to two hours on the commute, just sitting on the freeways in ones car, completely alone tuned into whatever bland offerings the radio waves proferred, while in Japan I don't think I had a car-ride longer than 30 minutes the whole time I was there (airport lift) .. and there is something to be said for the vital 'energy' that imbues a place like Tokyo at 9pm in the evening on a Tuesday, where most of the world is still at work. Albeit drunk, at least in a good mood, but nevertheless: still working. I got used to heading out at 10pm on any workday and feeling really alive out there in the walking streets, like there wasn't a "shutdown" period before 12am. The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal that life was ..

hvs 12y ago
it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home I highly recommend it. It's called having a life.
- ibisum 12y ago
  Saying that having a strong work ethos means 'not having a life' is about as derogatory as you can get without actually calling someone names .. whereas I found that the Japanese integration of work/home life really meant that there was more focus on really caring about what you were doing. Okay, there are exceptions, but I have to say that it was very clear to me that the two cultures have their own ways. It was considered just as 'degrading' not to be spending time with your co-workers in Japan .. which way is 'right'? This is clearly a cultural decision, and therefore: utterly arbitrary.

limaoscarjuliet 12y ago

I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)

infruset 12y ago
They come in to work and they do what? What service is it?
rambojohnson 12y ago
> they shout "HAI" hit login button. what?
marak830 12y ago
Hahaha. I live in japan and i can definatly agree with this!!!

philip1209 12y ago

I wonder whether concurrent write operations in a single data center or the load of achieving consistency between data centers caused more issues.

hawkw 12y ago

As a Scala enthusiast, it's neat to see one of my pet languages get press, but...a "software engineering technology called Scala"? Did you mean "programming language"?