Cue Ride of the Valkyries, Here Comes Twitocalypse Now
June 12, 2009 by Ewan
Is the Web 2.0 equivalent of the Millennium Bug almost upon us?
Twitter might be the site that gets all the attention, but it might have a problem early next week. because of the volume of messages going through the system, programmers are crossing their fingers about how people are counting the message.
Twitter recommends that people who write applications that use the service are using 64 bit unsigned numbers to store the ID of each tweet. If they’ve been using signed 32-bit integers then they can only reference around 2,147,483,647 tweets… then next one would make things go, well, a bit unpredictable.
Wherecloud have brought it to our attention, along with the fact that Twitter is receiving around 95 tweets every second – about half of those are from Robert Scoble.
In all likely hood very little will happen, as the reminder from Twitter to the developers to use the right type of number is being pushed heavily, so the major clients will be fine… but there could be a run of smaller clients that fail to work.
Around 8am on 15th June is the deadline. Will the web service du jour survive?
Find out Monday!
The countdown can be found at www.twitpocalypse.com.
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