Thinking about adding a Twitter stream to the Ubuntu install slideshow

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 03:15:42PM -0500, Jeff Lane wrote:
> One question would be whether Twitter would be happy with us or not
> for adding who knows how many new clients at once (thinking of
> number of installs done within the first 2 weeks of a release)
> that's a huge hit to Twitter's service twice a year... wonder if it
> could be considered a DOS of sorts? Just wondering there, I'm really
> not sure how that side of Twitter's service works, but it seems that
> the potential for a million new clients hitting the twitter service
> in one day may be problematic?

I share this concern; our sysadmins had some visualisations of 11.10
installs hitting the Ubuntu geoip service around release time, and
although I forget the numbers the spike was pretty huge.

Given our scale, I'd say that the neighbourly thing to do is for Ubuntu
installs to only touch Ubuntu network resources.  However, that isn't to
say that an Ubuntu service couldn't deal with fetching a set of
per-language feeds of interesting content from somewhere else, and then
multiplex those out to clients installing Ubuntu (which would also allow
filtering, swapping in some entirely different feed later, etc.).
Perhaps talk with the Canonical sysadmins about the practicalities of
this?

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]