Just wondering to know. Anyone has thoughts about it?
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Based on your update, I guess your actual question is whether GAE (Google AppEngine) could handle a volume comparable to Twitter’s volume.
Twitter gets something on the order of 20-30 million tweets per day. In addition to supporting the posting of tweets, they also have to serve them up to everyone reading them. I’ll pull numbers out of the air and guess that the typical tweet is read 20 times (the real number is skewed: a few tweets are read by vast numbers and others are probably never read by anyone; also a few systems attempt to read every tweet).
So the question is whether GAE can support 500 million requests per day.
According to GAE documentation, a paid (not free) application is allocated up to 500 requests per second. That’s too low by a factor of 10, but it also says that you can request additional requests per day if needed. I am sure if you cared enough to pay for it that Google would be willing to dedicate the resources of 10 applications. Their infrastructure can certainly support it — this is dwarfed by the number of searches the Google homepage supports daily.
So the answer is yes, GAE could support Twitter. (No other resource seems likely to pose as much of a problem as the number of requests.) A different question would be whether it would be BEST and be COST EFFECTIVE to run an app of this size on GAE; that would depend on other factors, but the answer is probably “No”. At that scale, you can get savings from specialized hardware of your own (although it WOULD be nice to have Google paying all the administrative costs).