Twitter Very Slow In India: Elon Musk

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk said that the microblogging site in India is facing issues with performance and speed. Musk commented on the situation in India in a Twitter conversation with Mike Schroepfer, the former CTO of Facebook and Meta.

After Schroepfer called Elon’s earlier comments on Twitter being slow a ‘claim’, the new owner of the microblogging site explained that it was a fact.

“10 to 15 secs to refresh homeline tweets is common. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all, especially on Android phones,” Musk said, adding, “Only question is how much delay is due to bandwidth/latency/app.”

Musk further explained that around 1,200 microservices or RPCs were operating on the server side, which was bogging down Twitter. Citing the server control team, Musk said only around 40 of the 1,200 microservices were essential to Twitter.

“Trimming down that 1200 number, reducing data usage, serialized trips & simplifying app are all needed to improve speed of use,” Musk tweeted.

For the uninitiated, Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a technique which is used to construct distributed, client-server-based applications. RPC is used to call other processes on the remote system like a local system. 

It is a software communication protocol that one program can use to request a service from another program on a separate computer on a network without having to understand the network’s details.

Incidentally, this ties into the recent controversy around Elon Musk and a former Twitter employee Eric Frohnhoefer. When Musk first apologised for Twitter being slow, he said that the app was doing around 1,000 RPCs just to render a home timeline.

However, Frohnhoefer claimed that the number Musk cited was wrong. This led to a public argument following which Frohnhoefer was fired by Musk.

Following the controversy, Musk said that Twitter engineers told him the number of RPCs was close to 1,200, adding, “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.”

Twitter will also soon stop displaying the device on which a tweet was written, as it is a “waste of screen space & compute” according to Musk. In a tweet dated November 14, he added that in some parts of the world, Twitter was taking as much as 30 seconds to refresh the timeline. 

Musk said that going forward, Twitter’s RPCs will be trimmed to increase the app’s speed and displaying the device information was not necessary. Incidentally, Twitter stopped displaying device information in 2012, but the feature came back in 2018.

Elon’s start to life at the head of Twitter has been marred with controversy. Soon after taking over the reins, Musk not only fired the top brass, including the CEO Parag Agrawal but also laid off 3,700 employees in one of the largest tech layoffs conducted in 2022.

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