How did a Japanese anime film set a Twitter record for the largest number of tweets per second?

How did a Japanese anime film set a Twitter record?

Aug 20th 2013, 23:50 by T.S. & E.S.

STUDIO Ghibli is a Japanese animation studio renowned for its hugely successful anime films, the best known of which is “Spirited Away”, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, which won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2003. Earlier this month the studio won an accolade of a rather different kind, when the airing of another of its films, “Castle in the Sky” (pictured), set a new record for the largest number of tweets per second. How did the film set this record, and why is Twitter so keen to explain how it coped?On a typical day around 500m tweets are posted on Twitter, which works out at an average of 5,700 tweets per second. On August 3rd the screening of “Castle in the Sky” on Japanese television caused an unprecedented surge of tweets: 143,199 within a single second, or 25 times the usual volume, according to a blog post by Raffi Krikorian, a senior engineer at the microblog service. This was not the first time “Castle in the Sky” had set a record: the film came out in 1986 and has since been shown on television several times. In December 2011 it triggered a record 11,349 tweets per second, exceeding the previous peak of 8,868 tweets per second which ensued when Beyonce, a singer, announced that she was pregnant.

“Castle in the Sky” prompts these enormous spikes of tweets because a tradition has arisen among fans that they all tweet a single word at the exact moment in the film when two of the characters utter the word to cast a magic spell. (Going into any more detail would spoil the story, which is set in a steampunk world of airships and other flying machines, and is your correspondents’ favourite film in the Studio Ghibli canon.) This unusual degree of co-ordination concentrates an enormous number of tweets into a short period of time, which is why “Castle in the Sky” can generate a bigger traffic spike than, say, the Super Bowl (which goes on for hours) or New Year’s Day (when an enormous volume of celebratory messages is spread throughout the day).

Mr Krikorian’s post explains in gory technical detail how Twitter has overhauled its systems over the past three years to enable it to cope with a growing volume of tweets and occasional traffic spikes. “Our users didn’t experience a blip,” he declares. The infamous “fail whale”, a graphic that is displayed when Twitter is overloaded, would seem to be a thing of the past. Evidently the motivation for the overhaul was that Twitter was unable to cope with surges of traffic during the 2010 football World Cup, irritating users who were trying to discuss the action while watching it on television. Trumpeting its ability to cope with this latest spike is a good way for Twitter to demonstrate the robustness of its platform as it prepares for a long-anticipated stockmarket flotation. It shows, in short, that Twitter has grown up. It also highlights the popularity of tweeting while watching television, which is how Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, hopes to make money (he calls Twitter the “second screen”). This week Twitter hired Jennifer Price, a former head of media and entertainment advertising sales at Google, to expand its effort to sell services to television advertisers. By demonstrating Twitter’s reliability and popularity, Japanese anime fans may just have made her job a whole lot easier.