Measurable Improvements 1 month ago

Last night’s maintenance was a success — and, in fact, it only took 30 minutes instead of the scheduled two hours. It was another small step, but definitely in the right direction.

As we mentioned yesterday, page response times have significantly improved in the last week, as you can see from this chart:

(Here’s a live version from Pingom, so you can check on us any time.)

What’s more, sightings of the famous “Fail Whale” have gone down precipitously.

As you can see, while you had approximately a 1-in-29 chance of hitting a whale nine days ago, you only had a 1-in-2000 chance yesterday. And this is with Twitter handling significantly more traffic and updates.

This isn’t good enough, of course. There’s still tons to do. But we have a plan and are encouraged by this improvement. As always, we appreciate your patience as we work through these kinks in our system.

-@ev