Comment by ndriscoll
4 days ago
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.
4 days ago
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.
>> For reference, I've seen Visa marketing materials that suggest their network can do ~70k TPS.
> Roughly a hundred servers on 100 GbE ports each could handle one small UDP packet per human every second ...
While there is no correlation between the Visa claim of 70k tps to people on the planet, there is also no correlation to the number of servers needed to process UDP packets.
The "Visa network" is more of a trusted collaboration between a small number of banks operating multi-step transactions than it is an OSI Layer 1 - 5 concern.
> Illustrative of course: the point is that "for every human" is not far out there given how crazy powerful hardware has become.
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.
It's also worth noting that all of those systems could be served by your phone.
Hm, what am I not getting? One transaction per second for every human on the planet would be 8 billion TPS, not 70k, no?
Yes, the point is it's difficult to even conceive of something that needs anywhere near the billions of TPS, because generally speaking, humans are not doing something with a computer once per second on average. Far lower. I might use my credit card less than once per day on average.
Ah, yes, humans don't, but computers do. I'd imagine there are plenty of systems that ingest automated data (eg sensors) that need billions of TPS.