[ Thanks to Jason
Perlow for this link. ]
“Twitter’s problems cannot be solved in a massive scale
out distributed systems manner. When you are dealing with systems
that are hitting a live database and performing millions of row
inserts at any given time, you are going to go beyond the limits of
what off-the-shelf client/server hardware can accomplish.“Before I joined IBM in September of 2007, I had just completed
a project for a large government agency that needed a system that
could accomplish approximately 5,500 database row inserts and reads
per second, or approximately 18 million transactions per week. And
as a customer requirement, we had to do it with COMMODITY HARDWARE.
Read as, Intel Chips and Linux.“The heart of the “beast”, as those of us referred to it, was
comprised of 4 Unisys ES7000-based Oracle 10g RAC nodes, each using
256GB of RAM and sixteen dual-core Intel Xeon processors, and the
most sophisticated, high-performance Cisco 10Gbps Ethernet
switching that money could buy which was available between all the
main clustered and load balanced tiers of the system — Web, J2EE
Application Servers, Messaging Queue and Database.”