Today is Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and one can expect a lot of breaking news. And if Twitter continues to function the way that it usually does (always down) it will surely piss off people more than ever.

So how is Twitter going to fight with this problem?

Twitter blog answers:

We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency. This work is in intended to help handle the load and keep Twitter up and running while Steve Jobs talks about all the new products and services Apple has planned. Of course these improvements will continue to serve Twitter beyond the WWDC as well.

Let’s hope and believe to what they say for now. As later on we can always screw them if they fail to maintain the level.

In case they fail do they have a backup plan?

Twitter blog says: In the event that our estimates and preparations fail, we have designed a way to keep Twitter updates moving quickly through the system to their respective recipients. We have isolated and created on/off switches for many Twitter features. Should it become necessary to shed incoming load quickly, we can turn off features such as stats, pagination, and several others to preserve the reliability and timeliness of your Twitter timeline.

Why is Twitter always down?

In one of my earlier post I had mentioned that Twitter Developer blog claims that Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.

But the fact is that people use it as a messaging system. Here is an example on how Twitter works: If Mr. X has 10,000 followers and if he tweets that tweet is received by all 10,000 followers unless it is a direct message to a specific user. Now the main issue is that not everyone access Twitter from the parent site. People use different applications to access Twitter. These messages then go into a database, which then figures out how those messages are to be delivered to each of the followers. At times this overloads the database and cause Twitter to function abnormally i.e “down” In simple words they need to have more servers.

Lately I have noticed that people are getting more and more frustrated by Twitter being down. They are now opting for other substitutes. You can find out here what the other options are.

Besides these options the recent one to add the list is Plurk.com. Lately people are switching over to plurk.

What exactly is Plurk?

Plurk is similar to Twitter. It is a micro blogging site almost with same features that Twitter has. The only additional features known to me are that you can share your YouTube videos and pictures. As it gets more number of users I hope that its services are not down like Twitter. I hope that they have done their home work and learned many things from Twitter’s case study.

P.S. You can follow my updates on Twitter.

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