Elon Musk says Twitter slow in India, experts question his claims

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk said that the microblogging platform is very slow in India and many other countries, compared to the United States. He said that Twitter refreshes in about two seconds in the US, while it could take about 20 seconds in India, due to “bad batching/verbose comms.” In a tweet, he said he would "like to apologise for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” he wrote. An RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is a software communication protocol that allows apps to request a service from another computer on a connected network.

Btw, 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!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022

In another tweet, Musk said that while the same app refreshes in the US in roughly 2 seconds (which is too long), it takes 20 seconds in India due to subpar batching and verbose communications. “I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices… Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low,” he tweeted.

There are ~1200 “microservices” server side, of which ~40 are critical to Twitter working at all, according to server control team.

Trimming down that 1200 number, reducing data usage, serialized trips & simplifying app are all needed to improve speed of use.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022

When former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Meta, Mike Schroepfer questioned this claim, Musk replied, "Twitter is very slow in India, Indonesia & many other countries. This is fact, not “claim”. 10 to 15 secs to refresh homeline tweets is common. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all, especially on Android phones. Only question is how much delay is due to bandwidth/latency/app.”

A Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer contested the reasons provided by Musk for the delay, and was eventually fired. Several Android developers and other experts also disagreed with Musk’s claims, and said that there could be other reasons affecting Twitter’s speed in countries like India.

I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong. https://t.co/sh30ZxpD0N

— Eric Frohnhoefer @ (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 13, 2022

Musk also said that he planned to remove about 80% of the microservices Twitter uses, saying they were unnecessary. This claim was also criticised by several engineers and experts. “Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!”