politwitter was getting a good amount of users yesterday during the BC election coverage.
http://politwitter.ca/province/bcover 100 users online constantly for an hour or 2, and there was a short period where it spiked to over 600 users. THEN twitter decided to die and stop updating their API or any search results. So even on twitter.com and 3rd part apps people couldn't get updates on hash tags or search terms. Great timing! It was down for about an hour, politwitter was still functional, just no updates for that hour.
The heavy load on the site made it slow down a lot during times and froze the site completely when that 600+ users all came at once. So I have much work to do improving the systems to handle heavy loads. But this was a good test, need these real world tests to find these things out. I found a couple bugs I was able to fix because of this. One being the site was "rate limited" by twitter even though i'm whitelisted I excedded the 20,0000 requests per hour. So i had to add checks in the code for that, and I added a counter like Tweetdeck has, to the bottom of the page. The big bug I found is that when a user has “auto-update” enabled its possible for them to miss a tweet, if the tweet interval is really fast, like it was during the election evening. So I need to resolve that.
Now I am starting to add Nova Scotia politicians to the sites database, since that’s the next election. If you know any provincial NS candidates with twitter, please submit them to politwitter.ca
here is what i've found so far
http://politwitter.ca/page/canadian-pro ... rovince/nsWAY less than BC, you Nova Scotians don't seem to be as 'hip' with teh internets.
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