# How Twitter handled personalized timelines for their users

DevFeed: [How Twitter handled personalized timelines for their users](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-twitter-handled-personalized-timelines-for-their-users-37171.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://arkadiuszchmura.com/posts/how-twitter-handled-personalized-timelines-for-their-users/>)

Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Arkadiusz Chmura](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/arkadiusz-chmura.md>)

Topics: [X (Twitter)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/twitter.md>), [Scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/scalability.md>), [Databases](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/databases.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>), [SQL](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sql.md>), [Users](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/users.md>)

Tags: [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [databases](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/databases.md>), [operations](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/operations.md>), [scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scalability.md>), [sql](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sql.md>), [twitter](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/twitter.md>), [users](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/users.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how Twitter addressed scalability challenges for personalized timelines, focusing on fan-out caused by delivering new posts to many followers. It introduces a traditional relational-database approach and discusses the resulting workload of assembling timelines on demand.

## Source excerpt

The approach described here might be useful to you if your application has some sort of a personalized feed for each user.