Twitter is a "free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets". It's gaining popularity last months - userbase is growing rapidly. It's interesting to analyse Twitter's server infrastructure load by observing service response time over few days.
One week HTTP measurement
I'm using another service: site-uptime.net to record and analyse statistics from running Twitter website. Measurements are performed every 15 minutes using HEAD requests, total time of receiving response (excluding DNS resolution time) is collected. Here are the results showing data collected from eight days using station from Poland:
You can see time response spikes located every ~10 PM GMT +2. Are they related to server load or network? To check that we can see measurements retrieved using station from Chicago, USA:
The picture is quite different. Seems the traffic on network connection to Europe causes higher access time. Let's see if it has impact on speed of serving responses:
Not so bad. ~90% of requests are served under 1 second, it's very good result. Average response time is 650 ms, minimal: 370 ms . Note no downtimes in January - a good result.
Where's Twitter located?
Let's see where twitter.com web server is located:
$ mtr twitter.com (...) 6. te3-1.lonse1.London.opentransit.net 0.0% 27 48.2 48.8 47.8 49.8 0.5 7. xe-3-1.r01.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 48.6 96.8 48.1 244.9 67.3 8. ae-1.r22.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 50.3 50.9 48.9 72.3 4.6 9. as-0.r20.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 131.7 129.7 127.7 132.7 1.4 10. ae-0.r21.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 124.1 125.3 122.6 136.4 2.8 11. as-0.r20.chcgil09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 141.4 146.0 139.8 172.6 9.1 12. ae-0.r21.chcgil09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 144.7 147.4 143.7 181.2 7.7 13. as-5.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 199.7 210.2 199.7 281.7 18.4 14. xe-1-1-0.r20.mlpsca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 27 203.7 204.2 198.9 242.5 8.0 15. mg-1.c20.mlpsca01.us.da.verio.net 0.0% 26 200.1 200.2 195.2 207.2 2.5 16. 128.241.122.117 0.0% 26 196.7 197.6 193.1 209.1 2.7 17. 168.143.162.5 0.0% 26 201.7 226.6 196.2 278.5 28.2 18. 168.143.162.36 0.0% 26 196.4 212.4 195.8 261.2 21.0
Far from Europe (200 ms). geoiptool service will show more details:
Servers are located in Colorado. The best times I can get from USA is ~110 ms (tested from Newark). Seems Europe Twitter users are in worse position, but the kind of service (short messages, easily compressable text content) works fine with such packet delays.
About Measurement Service
site-uptime.net allows you to measure any website and notify you on downtimes. You can check how your website is visible for customers 24/7 and are able to track any problems (even if they appear out of your local business hours).