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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Scoble writes something—6,800 writes are kicked off, 1 for each follower. Michael Arrington replies—another 6,600 writes. Jason Calacanis jumps in—another 6,500 writes. Beyond the 19,900 writes, there’s a lot of additional overhead too. You have to hit a DB to figure out who the 19,900 followers are. [...] And here’s the kicker: that giant processing and delivery effort—possibly a combined 100K disk IOs—was caused by 3 users, each just sending one, tiny, 140 char message. How innocent it all seemed.

Isreal L'Heureux

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2 comments

  1. Good point but the numbers are out of date, the effects now dwarf the period when that post was written.

    Scoble now has 25,078 followers (and follows 21,144!).

    Techcrunch (Arrington) has 18,053 followers.

    Jason Calacanis has 26,153 followers (and follows 29,071!)

    Each has twittered 12219, 2351, and 4508 times respectively. They generate gigantic, massive amounts of churn.

    huxley - 24th May 2008 12:41 - #

  2. I first saw this quote over on Dare's blog where the numbers had been updated, but I wanted to link back to the original when I quoted it so I figured it was a more accurate representation to quote the original figures as well. Yet another problem with my self-imposed limitations on how quotations are stored in my blog engine.

    Simon Willison - 24th May 2008 18:20 - #

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