Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why did Twitter have so many problems if it is made with Ruby?

19th February 2012

My answer to Why did Twitter have so many problems if it is made with Ruby? on Quora

The technical problem Twitter solves (distributing millions of short messages per minute to an enormous graph of follow relationships) is extremely hard in any language.

Posted 19th February 2012 at 2:21 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Introducing Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they’ve built - 10th February 2026
How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code - 7th February 2026
Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly - 6th February 2026

This is Why did Twitter have so many problems if it is made with Ruby? by Simon Willison, posted on 19th February 2012.

rails 74 ruby 72 twitter 160 quora 1005

Next: What web programming framework best supports 'drag and drop' actions? Please give examples of sites and/or plug-ins that support the interaction.

Previous: Is it reasonably safe to visit Ethiopia and then to fly from Ethiopia back home via Cairo?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe