Posted in
Main on September 1st, 2008 by Pingdom
Twitter seems to be making good on their promise to improve the stability of their microblogging service, at least when it comes to the website itself (which is what we monitor here at Pingdom). Lately, their website has shown a significant improvement in both availability and response time. Is the infamous Twitter “fail whale” facing an early retirement?
Here is the downtime for www.twitter.com for the last three months:
- June: 11h 36m
- July: 4h 12m
- August: 1h 3m
August is showing a significant improvement over previous months. The August downtime of just over one hour is the best Twitter has done since our monitoring of them started back in February 2007.
The improvement is also reflected in the load time of their website. Here is the response time curve for the last three months (HTML load time) for www.twitter.com:

As you can see in the graph above, August has been a solid month for Twitter with very even performance (at least when it comes to accessing their website, i.e. the Twitter login page).
We would like to congratulate the Twitter team on their progress. It looks like their hard work is paying off!
(It should be mentioned that we are a bit biased… Twitter is a Pingdom customer. That said, the monitoring results shown here come from monitoring that has been set up separately by us here at Pingdom.)
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on February 6th, 2012 by Pingdom
The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.
As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.
It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.
Read more
Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.
Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.
What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.
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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h
This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.
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Posted in
Main on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.
Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.
We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.
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Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.
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Luke Gedeon
September 1st, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Is the lower downtime because of lower volume though? Many of the high-volume users have left or scaled back usage, or they have been throttled.
Also without twitter going to IM, I have about forgotten about it. I wonder if the lower downtime is because they are just not cool anymore.
Andrew Finkle
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:26 am
This graph also coincides with the summer, historically this is the slowest time of the year for Internet usage. Though I hope that this accurately shows an improvement in infrastructure, the verdict is still out in my opinion. I think there are more important improvements that Twitter can make at this time anyway (as I outlined on my blog).
Pingdom
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 am
Thanks for the feedback so far!
@Andrew: Pingdom is a Swedish company, and here in Sweden the main summer holiday period covers late June, July and early August. Twitter isn’t huge in Sweden, though, so US vacation should be a much bigger factor (especially considering the difference in population size…)
Out of curiosity, when is the main summer holiday period in the US? Is that August?
You have a point in that this could be a factor, but the change was sudden enough to lead us to believe that something was done “behind the scenes” at Twitter, i.e. they made something to speed up their website.
@Luke: You may have a point, but the traffic trend to Twitter.com seems to contradict this. It shows a clear, upward trend:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=twitter.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Ed Shaz
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Scott,
The peak Summer vacation season for the US, is
June through August. Essentially, a day after
most children get out of school for Summer break
until school resumes (much of the nation today 9/2).
I believe Twitter will continue to trend upward.
Doomsayers are not looking at the big picture.
The whale can pull a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
and will fly.
Thanks for your post,
Ed
Karthick Prabu
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:08 am
In addition to the ‘whale’ error page, I got another error page while browsing twitter. Refer http://www.kprabu.com/2008/08/twiitercom-error-page.html for the screenshot. Any body else got this error?
Evan Williams
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:33 am
Thanks for noticing! We still have a lot to do, but feels like we’re making progress.
To those that are wondering: No, it is not because of lower volume. In August, Twitter saw significantly higher traffic than ever before.
@karthick Not sure what that is; will look into it.
Pingdom
September 4th, 2008 at 2:09 am
@Evan: Thanks for taking the time to comment! (For those who don’t know, he’s one of the founders of Twitter.)
Eric Marden
September 7th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
@Evan, what about the missing track and IM features? What effect has that had on making it easier to scale?