Fastest way to listen to real-time tweets

Question

I'm looking for the fastest way to check if a specific user (TwitterID) has tweeted in real-time. To achieve this I have used Tweepy and the stream function, this results in a notification of the tweeted tweet in about -+5 seconds. Is there a faster way to check if someone has tweeted by using another library / requests or code optimization?

Thanks in advance.

import tweepy

TwitterID = "148137271"

class MyStreamListener(tweepy.StreamListener):
    def __init__(self, api):
        self.api = api
        self.me = api.me()

    def on_status(self, tweet):

        #Filter if ID has tweeted
        if tweet.user.id_str == TwitterID:
            print("Tweeted:", tweet.text)


    def on_error(self, status):
        print("Error detected")
        print(status)


# Authenticate to Twitter
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler("x")
auth.set_access_token("Y",
                      "Z")


# Create API object
api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True,
                 wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True)

tweets_listener = MyStreamListener(api)
stream = tweepy.Stream(api.auth, tweets_listener)

stream.filter([TwitterID])

Answer 1

I'd say around 5 seconds is a reasonable latency, given that your program is not running on the same server as Twitter's core systems. You're subject to network and API latency and those things are outside of your control. There's no real way to rewrite this logic to change the time between a Tweet being posted and it reaching the API. If you think about the internal stuff going on inside Twitter itself from a Tweet being posted and it being fanned out to potentially millions of followers, the fact that the API - AT THE END OF AN UNKNOWN NETWORK CONNECTION - gets the Tweet data inside of < 5 seconds is pretty crazy in itself.