In terms of public messages, they certainly aren't. We are collecting their public timeline and it's about 400k messages per day, each one less than 200 bytes (if you count metadata).
That's 80 MB of uncompressed data per day.
I don't know how much the private messages add to this, but it can't be an order of magnitude higher.
Perhaps they are continuously doing DB writes instead of keeping a write cache and storing content in batches, who knows.
"Perhaps they are continuously doing DB writes instead of keeping a write cache and storing content in batches, who knows."
If they are using rails (and certainly they started with it) that is almost certainly what they are/were doing. Thats the Rails Way. Store everything, load it up, remember nothing at all.
I don't know how much the private messages add to this, but it can't be an order of magnitude higher.
Perhaps they are continuously doing DB writes instead of keeping a write cache and storing content in batches, who knows.