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Twitter API vs. Yahoo Web Services - Performance and Reliability in the Cloud

I would be interested in running these tests again in a few months to see if Twitter's API has become faster
By Corey Goldberg
Article Rating:
August 4, 2008 01:00 PM EDT
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 10,262

Corey Goldberg's Blog

I've noticed the Twitter API is very slow and unreliable. Requests often take 10+ seconds to return. Sometimes they timeout with no response at all.

I put together some monitoring tools to see exactly how slow and unreliable the API really is (when it is even available!). This is obviously not a very scientific test; just a ballpark idea of performance. The monitoring tools are built with Python and RRDTool. To start with, I used a modified version of my rrdpy suite of tools (http://code.google.com/p/rrdpy).

I ran a test for 2 hours, hitting the API's Test Method every 30 seconds. The tools generated the following time-series graph of server response times:



The average response was 2.53 seconds, and we see a *lot* of variance in the data samples.


In comparison, here is the same test run against the Yahoo Search REST API:


Notice the small variance and the average server response time of 0.186 secs!


I would be interested in running these tests again in a few months to see if Twitter's API has become faster and more reliable.

Published August 4, 2008 – Reads 10,262
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Corey Goldberg

Corey Goldberg is a software engineer living in Boston.

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