A new homepage isn’t the only change Twitter has recently undergone. As the Twitter Engineering blog reports, the company has considerably improved search speed using a Java server called Blender, a new server that reportedly makes its search function three times faster than before.
Twitter search is one of the most heavily-trafficked search engines in the world, serving over one billion queries per day. The week before the company deployed Blender, the #tsunami in Japan contributed to a significant increase in query load and a related spike in search latencies.
Following the launch of Blender, the 95th percentile latencies were reduced by three times from 800 ms to 250 ms, and CPU load on the front-end servers was cut in half. Twitter now has the capacity to serve ten times the number of requests per machine.
In simple terms, for Twitter this means same number of requests, but with fewer servers and fewer costs. For the end users, this means that Twitter’s search engine will work much faster, and the iconic fail whale will make fewer appearances.
