Awesome to hear from someone on the other side of the API with knowledge of this. This is ringing bells for me. Yeah, the id parameter was how we knew how many servers there were, and we saw more assignment in some servers than others that neatly mapped to a int32 max failing to divide by the number of IDs we saw. I thought I recall Twitter confirming that was how round robin happened but I could be totally misremembering. We never got a contact to talk to Twitter about it. FWIW, we did eventually see this fixed. I imagine it was pretty easy to spot one server seeing less load than others.
The offset was actually how we calculated volume, because millisecond collisions become a variant of the german tank problem[1]. A few times when y'all made tweet volumes public it mapped pretty closely with our estimates.
This was around 2011, so your knowledge should be relevant.
The offset was actually how we calculated volume, because millisecond collisions become a variant of the german tank problem[1]. A few times when y'all made tweet volumes public it mapped pretty closely with our estimates.
This was around 2011, so your knowledge should be relevant.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem