Days after Twitter’s acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk, he has been working day and night to bring changes to the platform. He is recently worried about the slow performance of the app in several countries including India.
He tweeted, “Twitter is very slow in India, Indonesia & many other countries. This is fact, not claim”, Musk tweeted, adding that a refreshing time for tweets between 10-15 seconds is common. The billionaire said he wanted to know how much delay is due to the bandwidth, latency or app.”
According to an artificial intelligence expert, Mike Schroepfer, Twitter’s load time in India was 20 seconds. The ex-chief technology officer of Meta ascribed the time to 1200 remote procedure calls.
Musk tweeted in reply,”There are ~1200 “microservices” server side, of which ~40 are critical to Twitter working at all, according to the server control team. Trimming down that 1200 number, reducing data usage, serialized trips & simplifying the app are all needed to improve the speed of use.”
It all began when Musk tweeted an apology note on November 13 where he apologized to everyone for Twitter’s slow performance in several countries.
“Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”, he tweeted in a series of tweets.
“I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong. Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low”, he added.
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Remote Procedure Call is a communication software protocol that uses a client-server model where one program can request a service where the requesting program is known as a client, from a program that is located in a different computer that is known as a server which is connected to the network. The procedure call is also known as a function or subroutine call.
The 51-year-old billionaire took over Twitter in the most difficult way where he faced allegations and court proceedings. After acquiring Twitter, the first thing he did was to terminate the top executives of the company including the former CEO, Parag Agrawal.
Later, he took the step to charge $8 for the blue tick that Twitter provides for verified accounts. He is even working on eliminating bot accounts from the micro-blogging site. Users are worried about the app and many have even started to leave the platform including celebrities and brands.
