The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Operation ‘Unplanned’ Maintenance

Posted on | April 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Operation ‘Unplanned’ Maintenance

by Smitty

Conservative Twitter was aflame on Sunday with people wondering why the follower count for UnplannedMovie was all over the place. Quick notes:

  • I do Amazon Web Services work by day
  • I ain’t an apologist for @jack
  • I have no insight into the specifics of Twitter’s architecture.

My points:

  • Old-style relational databases strove for a single point of truth. To scale globally, the first thing one does is relax that. So, even though there is one URL for the @UnplannedMovie account, you aren’t guaranteed to be looking at the same data.
  • This reality of NoSQL storage is exacerbated by everyone and their sibling querying at the same time for the same data, and also following that account. When you do a cloud system, you employ rules to throw more resources at fresh demand.
  • I daresay that conservative twitter just offered a fantastic stress test of Twitter’s infrastructure. While they to events and hashtags all the time, I’m unaware of another case where they’ve thrown account following into the mix.

This is all probably too generous. We’d like to think that conservatives are a force to be reckoned with. But it’s not likely that the follow frequency was ever that significant. Again, I have no insights into what’s really afoot.

That said, let’s all just take a deep breath and understand that Unplanned got some great free advertising out of all that. Plan an informal event for your church to go support these kinds of movies.

 

Category: Abortion

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