zlacker

>>evanwe+(OP)
2010: "At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him"

https://gizmodo.com/5632095/justin-bieber-has-dedicated-serv...

>>molecu+qx
Bieber-related conversation might reasonably have been 3%. Updating his friend count was a constant source of lock contention on a particular mysql.

There were never explicitly dedicated databases/servers, unless you count the hotspot caused by whatever shard he hashed into.

>>fizx+Lx
Did they actually need to know Bieber's friend count both accurately and in real time?

I would expect that for top Twitter accounts like his, you could get a very good approximation by logging events that increment or decrement the friend count, and using the rates those events are occurring and the last known exact friend count to forecast the current friend count. That would not be exact, but I bet you could get it close enough that users would not see anything off about it.

>>tzs+TO
Yes they made Storm for this