I didn't get the impression that this would duplicate the entire functionality of Twitter, just what amounts to the MVP functionality. If you are only talking about the MVP it's at least somewhat plausible with a lot of careful engineering and highly efficient data manipulation.
Adding images, videos, other large attachments, rich search, and all the advertising and billing and analytics stuff would blow this out of the water, but... maybe not by as much as people think...? I would not be surprised if a very performance-engineered version of Twitter could run on a few dozen racks full of beefy machines like this with HPC-grade super-fast fabric interconnects.
I have a strong sense that most large scale systems are way less efficient than what's possible. They trade development ease, modularity, and velocity for performance by using a lot of microservices, flabby but easy and flexible protocols (e.g. JSON over HTTP), slow dynamic languages, and layers of abstraction that could be integrated a lot more tightly.
Of course that may be a rational trade-off if velocity, flexibility, and labor costs and logistics matter more than hardware, power, or data center floor space costs.
I didn't get the impression that this would duplicate the entire functionality of Twitter, just what amounts to the MVP functionality. If you are only talking about the MVP it's at least somewhat plausible with a lot of careful engineering and highly efficient data manipulation.
I agree mostly. Where I differ in that I would argue that hashtags were THE thing that Twitter is most known for but that could be a perspective from having been on the platform for forever and a day and I recognize not everyone may make that same association anymore.
Adding images, videos, other large attachments, rich search, and all the advertising and billing and analytics stuff would blow this out of the water, but... maybe not by as much as people think...? I would not be surprised if a very performance-engineered version of Twitter could run on a few dozen racks full of beefy machines like this with HPC-grade super-fast fabric interconnects.
I have a strong sense that most large scale systems are way less efficient than what's possible. They trade development ease, modularity, and velocity for performance by using a lot of microservices, flabby but easy and flexible protocols (e.g. JSON over HTTP), slow dynamic languages, and layers of abstraction that could be integrated a lot more tightly.
Of course that may be a rational trade-off if velocity, flexibility, and labor costs and logistics matter more than hardware, power, or data center floor space costs.