Like many social network products, TweetMeme was initially developed in PHP using the MySQL open source database. With Twitter users growing at a month-over-month rate of approximately 82% for the first half of 2009, TweetMeme needed to manage incredible scalability demands being placed upon its database infrastructure. The nature of real-time search also meant that to stay competitive, TweetMeme needed to be highly available, offer lightning fast service delivery capability, while ensuring that management and administration costs didn’t grow out of control.