After switching to a Java server called “Blender”, Twitter really cut down search latency. Good to see that they’re migrating away from Ruby over to a Java server. Hopefully this will allow them to continue to scale, and keep latencies low even in mega crunch times, such as natural disasters or political uprisings..

In the spring of 2010, the search team at Twitter started to rewrite our search engine in order to serve our ever-growing traffic, improve the end-user latency and availability of our service, and enable rapid development of new search features. As part of the effort, we launched a new real-time search engine, changing our back-end from MySQL to a real-time version of Lucene. Last week, we launched a replacement for our Ruby-on-Rails front-end: a Java server we call Blender. We are pleased to announce that this change has produced a 3x drop in search latencies and will enable us to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months.

Source: Twitter is now 3x Faster Thanks for the heads up, Ben Beyda

Listening to: Pinback – Fortress