Some answers , but bare in mind it has been awhile since I used twitter API -
In order to make the adaptor scalable and fault tolerant you can consider the following techniques -
- Use several instances (i.e - clustering) of your client- it really depends what it does, but you may decide to use an Active-Active or Active-Passive clustering model
- If you go for clustering - Do you have clients connecting to the adapter? If so , you will need a load balancer that supports sticky session (so during a given session, a client addresses the same Adapter instance) - check [this][1] link for some info.
- I recommend you use caching for twitts - and if we look at a cache as map of key to value, and then your key can probably the URL that you use in order to get the information from Twitter API (If I recall, the API is some sort of a RESTful web service)
You should set eviction policies on the cache (i.e - how long the data is considered relevant for you) - this may help you both in performance, and both to reduce the number of accesses to twitter (I'm referring you to the part of your question about the rate limit).
- Maybe you should see if you can share information between users - but this will have some logic involved.
An example - if user A follows user B, and B follows A, they might have more common followers or users they follow, and you can share data.
- If you go for clustering as I suggested before, your cache should be distributed. You can use EHCache for this
- If you store information at database - try to minimize data base accesses, by building a thread local bases caching system (so within a thread, if you perform twice get on the same ID for the same entity, without a write, you will not access the database twice...)
Kortom, dit is slechts een tip van een ijsberg voor advies, u moet uw vereisten zorgvuldig kennen, cases en flows gebruiken en bekijken hoe u elk van deze kunt optimaliseren.