Maximum performance of the Streaming API?

[xempew]

Here’s 2 extreme examples:

You’re getting notified for tweets with #bob. 1 million users globally tweet something with #bob in a 10 second period.
Or…
You’re getting notified if someone follows you. 1 million users globally follow you in a 10 second period.

All other bottlenecks aside, will the API service actually try to provide notification of all 1 million events?

Thanks,
xempew

[andypiper]

The public Streaming API broadly provides access to up to 1% of public tweets from the overall volume (aka the firehose).

The sample endpoint reaches an average of 50-60 tweets per second.

If you were to use the filter endpoint to search for #bob, you’d see all the tweets posted up to 1% of the total firehose volume at any given time.

If you were to try to consume the whole firehose, you’d be looking at a huge number of tweets and need a very large box to process them. We’d recommend working with a data partner or our own GNIP APIs to provide more detailed access to historical Twitter data.

Here’s a great post on using the Streaming APIs which provides more context, by our own @romainhuet! There are some nice sample apps provided, too.