Comment by saberience

That’s volume in terms of total payments, but in terms of number of API requests it’s surprisingly little.

I used to work in payments myself and I was shocked by how little the throughout is in terms of actual transactions per second. There simply aren’t that many payments happening globally at any moment, especially when compared to other industries.

A single games company can be doing far more API requests than the total volume of payments happening concurrently in the world, ditto for ads companies or observability companies.

At a payments company, 500 payments per second is considered high throughput and 1000 payments per second is a huge amount of volume. I’ve worked at games companies where 5000 transactions per second is low throughput.

The hard part in payments companies is consistency and reliability and “correctness”, the actual load and volume is embarrassingly small.