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As Barack Obama made history, Twitter sustained record-breaking activity on its microblogging service as voters across the globe tweeted their election night reactions.
“We've yet to do a full analysis for election day, but last night we saw messages per second peak at about 2-3 times what they did during the first presidential debate — which at the time was record-breaking activity for Twitter,” co-founder Biz Stone told wired.com.
The first debate saw updates jump 18.5 percent in a week and sign-ups boosted by 23 percent.
Proving itself capable of handling traffic on one of the biggest days of its existence is an important step for the site, which has yet to nail down a revenue model but is growing rapidly and becoming more mainstream.
The service faced episodic downtime earlier this year, but Stone says they’ve developed a strategy that has been successful in preventing visits from the notorious "fail whale."
“Our approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it's no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point and so on. This simple technique has vastly improved performance, reliability and capacity,” said Stone.
Tuesday was clear of errors for the most part, but as soon as Obama was declared the victor, there were a few delays.
“We did see a huge influx of messages during Obama's acceptance speech, and fell behind on updating users' timelines for roughly 15 minutes as our system worked to process the backlog. The site, API and SMS service was 100 percent available as we processed that backlog,” said Twitter developer Alex Payne.
The small delays and increased performance got us thinking that perhaps
Twitter swapped out its current content management system for a messaging-based architecture.
But Payne says Twitter is still more or less the same architecture it's been since mid-2007, just highly optimized. He says more pieces of the service have been isolated and profiled, and that this has helped them handle high-load events like Election Day, particularly, separating out their interactions with the SMS aggregators so they're not bottle necked by them.
The boost in Twitter traffic presumably owes a great deal to partnerships like Current TV’s "Current Diggs the Election," Twitter’s Election
2008 page and the non-partisan, volunteer project Twitter Vote Report which aggregates tweets on voter’s polling experiences.
