“Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries,” tweeted Musk. “App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs [remote procedure calls] just to render a home timeline!”
Twitter software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer replied, "I have spent
~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.“
Musk replied, “Then please correct me. What is the right number?”
Frohnhoefer said, “Zero. The apps don’t make RPC calls.”
there’s some more elaboration from the engineer (and others concurring) quoted in this summary, though it hasn’t been updated to include that Musk fired him:
Soon after, Twitter software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer decided to
embark on a bit of career roulette. “I have spent ~6yrs working on
Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong,” he posted.
Musk returned: “Then please correct me. What is the right number?”
But perhaps it was not the number of RPCs, or remote procedure calls, that was the issue at all.
Further on,
Frohnhoefer pointed out that his team had “done a bunch of work to
improve performance” and agreed there was “plenty of room for
performance improvements on Android.” However, he added: “I don’t think
the number of requests is the primary issue.”
“I think there are three reasons the app is slow. First it’s bloated
with features that get little usage. Second, we have accumulated years
of tech debt as we have traded velocity and features over perf. Third,
we spend a lot of time waiting for network responses.
“Frankly we should probably prioritize some big rewrites to combat
10+ years of tech debt and make a call on deleting features
aggressively.”
Asked again about the “right number” of RPCs, Frohnhoefer replied flatly: “Zero. The apps don’t make RPC calls.”
[…]
Responding to Musk’s original post, software engineer Ben Leib said:
“As former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can
confidently say this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”
Sasha Solomon, staff software engineer and co-tech lead of the core API platform team at Twitter, waded in,
referring to the dramatic number of job losses among the technical
teams. “You did not just layoff almost all of infra and then make some
sassy remark about how we do batching[?]”
“Like did you bother to even learn how GraphQL works[?],” she said, referring to the query language which provides an approach to requesting data over HTTP.
On this day, 14 November 1917, the “Night of Terror” began at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, in which 33 imprisoned suffragists were brutally tortured and beaten by guards. The women, mostly members of the National Women’s Party had been picketing the White House in support of voting rights for women. Guards were ordered to attack the women on the evening of this day, and they began to assault the prisoners after midnight. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2134882206696918/?type=3
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