The engineer named Eric Frohnhoefer responded to Elon Musk’s tweet about Twitter performing poorly in some countries and said that it’s not true while also providing an explanation
Elon Musk on Sunday made a tweet about Twitter’s poor performance in many countries. “I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” wrote Elon in his Tweet.
Responding to the tweet, one Twitter employee named Eric Frohnhoefer wrote that what Elon has said is not true and that he can provide an explanation to prove his point. Continuing his reply, Frohnhoefer wrote that the Twitter application actually makes zero remote procedure calls and instead makes about 20 background requests.
Jumping into the conversation, Elon Musk replied to Frohnhoefer’s tweet and said that “the fact that you don’t realize that there are up to 1200 ‘microservices’ being called when someone uses the Twitter app is not great”. Frohnhoefer instantly replied to Musk and corrected him again while telling him that “ the number required to generate the home timeline is closer to 200 than 1200”.
The conversation continued in a long web of Twitter threads where both Twitter owner and employee continued to have somewhat of an unhealthy discussion. After a long while into the conversation, Musk asked Fronhoefer about what he has personally done to make Twitter better on Android.
After several hours of tweets and replies, the conversation finally ended and Musk tweeted that the employee could have had the conversation in Twitter’s private Slack rather than out here in public. Responding to the same thread, a user wrote that Musk could have also asked about the slowness issues privately to which Musk replied “He’s fired”.
