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Solving the Twitter Fail Whale

Twitter has become a near ubiquitous part of the web. With a steady stream of "Tweets" people can see what is happing within an organization in real-time.

Not surprisingly, many Ingeniux customers have embraced Twitter for their web communications and marketing. Twitter has become a mainstay on Ingeniux-powered websites.

The challenge is that refreshing a Twitter feed can be very slow, and sometimes completely unresponsive. This problem is so prevalent that is has its own moniker, the Twitter "Fail Whale." To make Twitter and other RSS feeds load fast and reliably the best solution is to cache the content on the web server and update the RSS feed on a periodic basis as opposed to every page request.

Within Ingeniux CMS there are a number of ways to address this challenge. Eastern Washington University wrote a component to fetch the Twitter information and cache it on pages. Another approach would be to use Ingeniux's Insert Element to aggregate the well-formed XML and to cache the page on the web server. The new Automated Tasks Framework would be a great tool for scheduling updates to the feeds.

Eric O. at Washington and Lee University took a different approach. He wrote a script to grab the Twitter RSS feed every ten minutes and save the contents of the feed to a local file. The file is cached on the web server. According to Eric the script worked so well at solving the Twitter Fail Whale they have expanded it to pre-load a wide range of their RSS feeds - and are now seeing faster page load times to boot.

You can get Eric's script and read about his experience on his blog - Solving the Twitter Fail Whale

Posted by David Hillis at 8:33 pm