Twitter performing very slow in India, says Elon Musk

“10 to 15 seconds to refresh homeline tweets is common. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all, especially on Android phones. The only question is how much delay is due to bandwidth/latency/app,” Musk tweeted in response to a mathematical calculation put forth by Mike Schroepfer, the former chief technology officer of Facebook and Meta.

The conversation on Twitter first began with Musk apologising for Twitter being super slow in many countries.

“App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” he said.

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a technique for constructing distributed, client-server based applications. A software communication protocol that one program can use to request a service from a program located in another computer on a network without having to understand the network’s details, RPC is used to call other processes on the remote systems like a local system.

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Sam Pullara, a former Twitter employee and CTO at Sutter Hill Ventures, had responded to Musk’s apology tweet and said: “The real issue imho is they undid server side renderiand you have to download tons of code just to see a single tweet. Other countries are slow because of the round trips and initial download and not so much from the backend since everyone shares that.”

“I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong,” Musk said.

According to Musk, the same app – Twitter – in the US takes about 2 secs to refresh, but nearly 20 seconds in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms and also because the actual useful data transferred is low.