I am having an impossible time coming up with a unbiased and substantiated opinion on this issue. On the one hand, we know nothing about Twitter's architecture other than they're (to some extent) using a language that has a notoriously under-optimized interpreter and a framework with reported scaling issues (unless you do a lot of hacking to it).
On the other hand, there's gotta be something fishy going on in Twitter-ville. Although I agree "the idea that building a large scale web application is trivial or a solved problem is simply ridiculous," by now Twitter should have enough performance data to know exactly which part of the process is causing the high-load issues they're having. If we are to assume that after each outage they at least "throw more hardware at it," then, theoretically, it's a problem that horizontal scaling cannot solve and the issue is deep-rooted in the system -- somewhere in the basic architecture of it.
Is it Ruby? RoR? Poorly optimized queries? Improper caching? Lack of domain knowledge? Leprechauns? I don't know, neither does anyone else outside of Twitter... but I guess speculation can be entertaining.
On the other hand, there's gotta be something fishy going on in Twitter-ville. Although I agree "the idea that building a large scale web application is trivial or a solved problem is simply ridiculous," by now Twitter should have enough performance data to know exactly which part of the process is causing the high-load issues they're having. If we are to assume that after each outage they at least "throw more hardware at it," then, theoretically, it's a problem that horizontal scaling cannot solve and the issue is deep-rooted in the system -- somewhere in the basic architecture of it.
Is it Ruby? RoR? Poorly optimized queries? Improper caching? Lack of domain knowledge? Leprechauns? I don't know, neither does anyone else outside of Twitter... but I guess speculation can be entertaining.