[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #88] 1 Billion Tweets Daily : Magic Behind Twitter Scaling and How It Actually Works

With detailed explanation and flow chart....

Jun 13, 2025

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Hi All,

Twitter's choice of Apache HBase as a key component of its data infrastructure enables it to manage over 1 billion tweets daily. This incredible feat allows Twitter to provide real-time tweet storage, retrieval, and analytics for hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Let's dive deep into how Twitter engineered this system, exploring the key architectural decisions, scaling strategies, and optimizations that enable HBase to handle this massive volume of tweets.

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System Overview

Before we delve into Twitter's HBase architecture, let's look at some key metrics that highlight the scale of its operations:

- Tweets processed daily: 1 billion+
- Active users: 330 million+
- Peak tweets per second: 143,199 (record)
- Data ingested daily: Petabytes
- Latency: Milliseconds for tweet retrieval
- Availability: 99.99%+
- Global deployment: Multiple data centers worldwide
- Supported content types: Text, images, videos, polls, etc.
- Real-time analytics: Trending topics, engagement metrics, etc.