Real-Time Delivery Architecture at Twitter

Attila Szegedi details the write and read paths of Twitter's real-time delivery system that handles thousands of tweets per second.

With hundreds of millions of users, Twitter operates one of the world's largest real-time delivery systems, large enough and pervasive enough to exert noticeable "pressure" on the overall internet itself. At steady state, Twitter receives thousands of tweets a second that it needs to deliver to disks, in-memory timelines, email, and mobile devices. The name of the game for Twitter is "now", so those deliveries, which multiply according to the graph of who follows whom, need to occur in real-time. In this session, we will dive into both the "write path" and "read path" of Twitter to understand the architecture which supports those tweets, and also how Twitter serves them through one of the world's largest web sites. Author: Attila Szegedi Attila Szegedi is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Oracle, working on dynamic language features on the Java platform and the Nashorn JavaScript runtime for the JVM. Before joining Oracle, Attila worked as a Staff Engineer in Twitter's Runtime Systems group. He is also known for his work on several Open Source projects, most notably he is a contributor to Mozilla Rhino, an earlier JavaScript runtime for the JVM, a contributor to Kiji, Twitter's server-optimized Ruby runtime, the author of Dynalink, the dynamic linker framework for languages on the JVM, as well as one of the principal developers of the FreeMarker templating language runtime.