How Twitter got a 30% performance boost from DTrace
Twitter has experienced meteoric growth in the last few months, and as most users of the service know, that has resulted in some stability issues. Growing pains. I just came across this post by one of my cohorts, David Steward, over at the Intel Software Network blog on DTrace, a Solaris feature that Linux people drool over, and how the Twitter devs were able to squeeze a 30% performance boost out of Ruby on Rails using it:
The recent example they used was Twitter. Remember my recent comments about this new micro-blogging application? Well it turns out that the gang at Twitter implemented their system using Ruby on Rails, the new and sexy rapid website programming system. After the article in the New York Times, Twitter has grown in popularity to be the biggest application of Ruby on Rails. And of course, they were having performance problems.
Fortunately for Twitter, they implemented it on Solaris, and thus DTrace to the rescue. Within a few hours, they had identified an issue with how often deep stack back traces were being taken, they get a fix from the Ruby guys and had a 30% performance boost.
Thanks for the post, David. Now, how about getting DTrace ported to Linux (and Mac, while you’re at it!). 