Elon Musk has been called out by Twitter employees numerous times over the past week. Musk recently claimed that the platform was not functioning at the level it should in many regions of the world. In a new tweet, Musk now says that Twitter is much slower in regions like India and Indonesia compared to the app’s functioning in the US.
In a previous tweet, Musk had said that Twitter refreshes in about 2 seconds in the US, compared to India where it could take about 10 to 20 seconds. The new Twitter CEO says this is could be due to ‘bad batching/verbose comms’.
Twitter is very slow in India, Indonesia & many other countries. This is fact, not “claim”.
10 to 15 secs to refresh homeline tweets is common. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all, especially on Android phones.
Only question is how much delay is due to bandwidth/latency/app.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022
“There are ~1200 “microservices” server side, of which ~40 are critical to Twitter working at all, according to server control team,” Musk adds in a later tweet, replying to Former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer (@schrep).
Schroepfer had previously questioned Musk’s ‘1200 RPCs’ claim as the main culprit of slowing down Twitter in many countries. For the uninitiated, an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is a software communication protocol that allows apps like Twitter to request service from another computer over a connected network.
“Trimming down that 1200 number, reducing data usage, serialized trips & simplifying app are all needed to improve speed of use,” Musk adds. In yet another tweet, Musk also suggests that there are parts of the world where a refresh on Twitter could take up to 30 seconds.
Android dev for 10ish years, this is more likely due to a lack of edge caching, cdn and service availability in the region vs anything to do with the app itself. If you use the same app in 2 regions and its slow in 1 of them, generally it has nothing to do with the client
— Matt Platoff (@matt_platoff) November 14, 2022
Several Android developers and coders outside of Twitter have also countered Musk’s claims, pointing out that other factors like ‘edge caching’ and ‘service availability’ could be influencing the speed of apps like Twitter in regions like India.
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