[jacques_chester]

Not an apples-to-apples comparison. UPS, Google and Facebook have much less concentrated product/service offerings (ie, they each have >1).

[ra]

> Not an apples-to-apples comparison.

So why did you make the comparision?

I am just pointing out that ck2's summation of Twitter understates the complexity of the problem they solve.

[jacques_chester]

> So why did you make the comparision?

My point was that twitter's scale and problem complexity are not unprecedented and that small, motivated teams have solved them before. Parallel queries and transactions for DB2 on z/OS were developed by small teams in Poughkeepsie, NY and Perth, Australia. Google's infrastructural software was designed by a small group of very bright people, and so on.

If we compare the groups actually working on the problems then I expect that twitter will have comparably small groups of engineers directly facing the scaling problem. And I also repeat the point that bigger problems have already been solved. Twitter's issues are not unprecedented if you are prepared to look outside the Journal of Stuff I Remember Seeing on Highscalability.com.

[ra]

I don't disagree with any of that, except that no one has claimed that Twitter's issues are, "unprecedented".

Once again I will reiterate I am just pointing out that ck2's summation of Twitter understates the complexity of the problem they solve.