Comment by zbentley
4 days ago
> 5 orders of magnitude too small for another.
Nitpick on an otherwise good post, but I don’t think there are very many 6billion RPS systems out there, and those that do exist are almost certainly using bespoke, purpose-built tools
The highest I could think of is WhatsApp, which gets ~1.6 million RPS on average, and they use MQTT
I used to scrape Meta sites at over 200k steady rps for a couple of years, all by myself.
They did send lawyers to my door in the end though.
Someone had forgot IPv6 rate limit bucketing :)
Tell more sounds like a good story
I work in manufacturing, you would be surprised at the volumes of sensor data being processed there for predictive maintenance.
MQTT is everywhere, indeed, because of how simple the protocol is (it’s very ubiquitous in IoT / embedded systems).
DynamoDB scales much more than that. In one of their dynamodb papers they claimed that the amazon us retail website alone made like 89 millions rps during prime day, a few years ago.
89M rps was the peak across all Amazon systems during 2021 Prime Day. Alexa, Amazon.com and the fulfilment centres together, not one site. But its still very impressieve. But the more importarnt number is the per partition limit, 3000 RCU and 1000 WCU. Horizontal scale is the easy part, a table only gets near it if the partition key actually spreads.
It's also one of the most aggravating database systems I've worked with.
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WhatsApp is primarily 1 to 1 messaging. Why would this be hard to scale? Scaling horizontally, sharding, and message routing is all it takes, surely?
AWS IAM handles over 1.2 billion requests per second, based on a 2024 post, im sure its higher now https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/an-unexpected-discover...
Maybe there would be more if it were more straightforward to do so?
For reference, I've seen Visa marketing materials that suggest their network can do ~70k TPS. There are not very many systems one could conceive of that could do useful work 1/s for ~every human on the planet.
> There are not very many systems one could conceive of that could do useful work 1/s for ~every human on the planet.
Roughly a hundred servers on 100 GbE ports each could handle one small UDP packet per human every second, and would have a plenty of cycles and RAM per human left to actually do some work.
That fits in a shipping container.
Illustrative of course: the point is that "for every human" is not far out there given how crazy powerful hardware has become.
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Considering Visa's user Time zone and population density. I wouldn't be surprised if WeChat in China or UPI in India have higher TPS numbers.
But then again it would still be no where near a million TPS.
There is a tendency in tech to forget that there were highly scalable systems, processing huge numbers of transactions, before the internet and “hyper scalars” were a thing.
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Hm, what am I not getting? One transaction per second for every human on the planet would be 8 billion TPS, not 70k, no?
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Doing 1 request for every person on this planet every second?
What are these, TCP packets?
Fair.
Could be base 2. ~1.3M RPS is a lot higher than most will ever require, but still within the realm of possibility.