I thought it would be fun to track the tweets during the Royal Wedding along with providing a test for some backend changes to Politwitter i've made to better handle high volume of tweets on election day.

I ran into a problem though! The Twitter Streaming API seemed to cap-out at 51 tweets/sec (3060 tweets/min). I know my database can handle inserts per/sec MUCH higher than that from my tests, so it seems to be a ceiling on the Twitter API. If you know more about this please let me know! I doubt Canadian political Twitter will ever reach that volume though. So the stats are not totally accurate because for 2 hours the tweets/sec were greater than this limit as you can see in the chart below. Lets get to the stats I was able to collect!

From 3:00am - 6:00pm (London time) there were 1,242,321 tweets!

Hashtags Usage

• #royalwedding 1,121,184
• #rw2011 88,011
• #katemiddleton 5,774
• #princewilliam 3,071

Top Retweeted Tweets

• @MileyCyrus: wow wow wow #royalwedding soooo romantic. FLAWLESS. =] How lucky is Kate? Its every girls dream to be a princess. Harry? ...
  • 4,750 retweets
• @BBCBreaking: Picture: Thousands cheer as the royal couple kiss on the Buckingham Palace balcony http://twitpic.com/4qybp0 #BBCWeddin ...
  • 1,329 retweets
• @KennyHamilton: Maybe @JustinBieber will go and sing "UP" #RoyalWedding
  • 1,250 retweets
• @Queen_UK: Packed one's handbag for tomorrow's wedding (miniature gin, remote weapons button, reading glasses, iPhone, bag of peanuts ...
  • 1,219 retweets
• @BigStaxxBoss: Imagine if Kanye interrupted the RoyalWedding, "Excuse me, Imma let ya'll finish but Jay-Z & Beyonce had the best wedd ...
  • 1,099 retweets

The Royal Wedding dominated the Twitter top trends