As Twitter has become more and more popular, there have been times when its users see the "fail whale" graphic on the Twitter.com site. That almost always means that the site is suffering from a high amount of traffic. This week, Twitter's blog page announced plans to boost the performance of the Twitter.com site.
The problems actually started in 2010, when Twitter decided to move much of the rendering of the site to its user's browsers. Now Twitter admits that move " ... lacked support for various optimizations available only on the server."
So Twitter has decided to move the rendering back to its servers. The company said, "This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers."
The highly technical blog entry also discusses other plans to speed up performance on the site, including eliminating the hashbang (#!) in Twitter.com URLs. Twitter states, "By removing the need to handle routing on the client, we remove many of these steps and reduce the time it takes for you to find out what’s happening on twitter.com."
The company is putting these improvements in place but at the moment there's no word on when it will be fully implemented.
Source: Twitter blog
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