Where To Turn When You Have A Scalability Growth Spurt

For the last few days the conversation at the forefront of the social web has been scalability, expecially as it applies to popular social site Twitter. Twitter is a simple application built on the Ruby on Rails programming framework, but it can't seem to keep up with its popularity. With every new Twitter activity flurry and new third party Twitter application there comes the inevitable Twitter downtime.

Twitter is not the only social media site that grew too fast. Scalability has become the latest buzzword of the social media set, with finger pointing and accusations flying. Most users seem to miss the irony that they are using the very applications they are complaining about, like Twitter, to talk about the lack of scalability, making sites like Twitter clogged with complaints about… well, itself.

People from all levels of the social media sphere have weighed in on various aspects of the issue, including former Twitter employees . Some blame the server infrastructure and some blame the programming and development side. In the end it is a two sided issue, with both being to blame for not being able to handle the workload caused by increasing popularity.

Companies like Google and GigaSpaces are stepping up to offer easy, expandable solutions to the infrastructure issue, but what's happening on the programming side? Several companies are using this firestorm to create a lucrative business or side business designed to address the scalability issue. Industry Standard wrote about efforts by one company, FiveRuns , to create a way for developers to track the success of their application.

The answer FiveRuns came up with is called TuneUp, and it acts like a real time bug finder, tracking issues as the early adopters test out a new site or application. TuneUp isn't the only answer to the scalability issue out there, however. Other companies jumping into the fray to offer help to developers in keeping up with use are New Relic , Engine Yard and RightScale, to name a few.

I have no idea if these companies are doing more than trying to shut the barn door after the cows are gone with this scalability issue, but as a Twitter addict, I'm certainly glad someone is trying to do more than wait for someone to buy the overloaded site in hopes that buyer will fix things. From where I stand, I just want my favorite apps to work. As an end user, I find I am having to think about how they work far more often than I want to lately, which takes some of the fun out of using the social web.