For folks who are not aware and often ask Which programming language is twitter written  in , the answer is, Scala. Developer at twitter had started with Rub on Rails but looks like they the high volume of traffic was too much for twitter or Ruby on rails ?

Their programmers have been saying

One of the things that I’ve found throughout my career is the need to have long-lived processes. And Ruby, like many scripting languages, has trouble being an environment for long lived processes. But the JVM is very good at that, because it’s been optimized for that over the last ten years. So Scala provides a basis for writing long-lived servers, and that’s primarily what we use it for at Twitter right now.

There could be other reasons which we are not ware of but there have been some real word applications build upon Ruby on rails, noticeably  cookfood.com which went public last year. So it is not that Ruby on Rails sucks.

If it comes to poor garbage collection in Ruby on rails , then there is an option to use JRuby . One of the very well written comments on this topic can be found here .

Just because twitter uses Scala and has dumped Ruby on rails does not imply anything. The architect team has to decide what works for them. What may work for twitter does not mean it will work for everyone else.

Google Analytic is the default freeware tool for monitoring the website traffic . It has also been used effectively to measure the traffic of blog. I have been wondering if there are any tools to monitor the twitter statistics. With twitter comes a typical problem that those users may or may not come to your site. So how do you monitor the effectiveness of twitter. Some tools for twitter are

• Twitter Analyzer – Did not find much usage except that it gives a graph of how much tweets you have done
• twitalyzer – Provides Influence,  Signal , Generosity, Trend , Velocity of your twitter account
• Klout -  I am not going to write much about clout because Avinash Kauushik has given a very detailed explanation on Klout in this post twitter quantitative qualitative analysis.

This week Twitter and facebook both faced DDOS attacks which bright their service down for some time. While facebook has recovered , twitter is yet to recover from these attacks. Let us try to get an idea what is DDOS attack .

DDOS – Distributed denial of service attack

This is a concentrated effort of users or group of users towards a machine or network to bring down the system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users. This attack is done by finding a weak machine in the network and making it the DDOS master.

This is done with malicious intent by hackers to bring the system down.

While the person(s) who have brought the facebook and twitter have not yet been identified , the attacks are still ongoing.

	distributed denial-of-service attack

Twitter has been a hot spot this year for worm, spam and phishing attacks, with the Mikeyy worm,and many other attacks hitting their site. The recent worm attack on Twitter is a virus that is spreading via a Twitter message claiming to be an invite from your friends and asking you to check your attachments.The attachment contains the Ackantta.B worm which is capable of taking over any machine it infects.

When it’s installed it immediately searches for any email contacts and sends itself to them, and sends your IP address to its botnet and prepares your PC for even more malware downloads.

This latest worm is not expected to spread very rapidly , due to the fact that many people are wary of opening their attachments, unless it is from a reliable source, plus many ISP’s do scan or block zip files.

Do follow the below tips and you can be safe:

1.dont follow people who follow you (check their profiles first)
2.don’t click on URLs in Tweets from people you don’t absolutely trust
3.protect your tweets so only people you approve can see them.

Go ahead and enjoy Tweeting..