The Twitter workload is inspired by the popular micro-blogging website. In order to provide a realistic benchmark, we obtained an anonymized snapshot of the Twitter social graph from August 2009 that contains 51 million users and almost 2 billion “follows” relationships [14]. We created a synthetic workload generator that is based on an approximation of the queries/transactions needed to support the application functionalities as we observe them by using the web site, along with information derived from a data set of 200,000 tweets. Although we do not claim that this is a precise representation of Twitter’s system, it still reflects its important characteristics, such as heavily skewed many-to-many relationships.
