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 8th, 2010 by Pingdom
Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.
Read more
Posted in
Main on February 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.
There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!
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Posted in
Pingdom on February 4th, 2010 by Pingdom
Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.
Enter our new “report banners”.
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Posted in
Main on February 1st, 2010 by Pingdom
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.
One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)
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Posted in
Main on January 29th, 2010 by Pingdom
The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?
To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.
So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.
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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?