Twitter Moves from Ruby to Java

In case you notice, Twitter search results are better than ever. That's because they're now using a Java server called Blender.

Twitter made a big shift, as the micro-blogging site moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to a Java server called Blender. As posted on Twitter’s engineering blog, the move was attributed with the back-end reliability issues. The change produced a three-times drop in search latencies, and it enables the site to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months.

Does that mean the Java is better than Ruby when it comes to heavy loads? Triomatrix Webservices director, Ganeshji Marwaha, says that it all depends.

“They say that this change will enable them to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months. That along with the news that Twitter has hired 25 more employees kinda tells that Java’s code base is practically more maintainable than equivalent Ruby code – at least when the code base is huge and the team size is large. Or that could mean that this time they really put a lot of thought into designing a maintainable system than when they started out. But for smaller team size and code base, RoR is still an unbeaten champion.”

You can visit Twitter’s blog post to learn more about the search capabilities if Java.