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"Why Us" => "I ran Postgres at Instacart, where we scaled the company 5x in April of 2020. The biggest problem we had was making Postgres serve 100,000s of groc
by codegeek 4mo ago
"Why Us" => "I ran Postgres at Instacart, where we scaled the company 5x in April of 2020. The biggest problem we had was making Postgres serve 100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute"
Couldn't be a better why us :)
- paoliniluis 4mo agoLegends
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- aurareturn 4mo agoIs 100k order per minute a lot? Even a single Postgres instance should serve that fine?
- smt88 4mo agoOne assumes they mean 100,000s (plural) concurrent users actively building carts
- aurareturn 4mo agoIs that still a lot? Feels like a single 64-core, 256GB RDS instance with some caching should handle that fine. RDS has instances up to 192-core and 768GB.
- smt88 4mo agoKeep in mind they’re doing real-time logistics and messaging, as well as type-ahead search and managing ads and promotions
- aurareturn 4mo agoI think the real-time logistics is likely the thing taxes a Postgres database. Everything else seems normal DB CRUD that a single beefy instance with a few replicas should handle easily. Type ahead search is no doubt using a different service and not directly querying Postgres.
- nine_k 4mo agoAverage throughput is one thing, tail latency, quite another.
- tomtomtom777 4mo ago100k(s) orders per minute is several orders of magnitude more than realistic. Amazon does 20k orders per minute. Instacart doesn't need "100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute". There must be some 0s added for the sake of the story.
- true_religion 4mo agoAccording their 2026 Q1 filing they do about 90 million orders per quarter which is about 12 orders per second, 720 orders per minute. It might make 100k row level changes per minute, but that’s a different metric. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/000157909126000032/q12026pressrelease.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/000157909126...
- FinnKuhn 4mo agoInstacard have released a public dataset[1] on their orders, so it should be even easier to verify this claim. From what I could find in some analysis[2] of this dataset around 100k orders per day and not per minute seems accurate. I assume they are referring to how many database requests they have due to customers orders or a similar metric and just worded it poorly. [1] https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/psparks/instacart-market-basket-analysis https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/psparks/instacart-market-bas... [2] https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/284199_5c498037acc64051862e0829c2702ce5.html https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/284199_5c498037...
- aeyes 4mo agoThis data set was released years before the Covid hypergrowth phase which they are referring to.
- FinnKuhn 4mo agoThat's fair as the Kaggle dataset[1] is from 2017. Even assuming orders scaled with revenue (which grew to $1.5B in 2020[2]), you'd only reach a few hundred orders/minute at the pandemic peak (which lines up with the calculation above via a different method). So I still assume the original comment isn't referring to actual orders placed. [1] https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/psparks/instacart-market-bas https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/psparks/instacart-market-bas... [2] https://fortune.com/2022/05/18/what-to-know-instacart-ipo/ https://fortune.com/2022/05/18/what-to-know-instacart-ipo/
- outworlder 4mo agoIt's orders, not queries. Who knows how many requests that actually takes.
- qaq 4mo agowhy did we switch to per minute? A modern quality enterprise SSD can do 35K +/- legit fsyncs per second.
- inigyou 4mo agoGives bigger numbers. But I agree per second is more honest.
- azinman2 4mo agoI’ve always found Instacart to be extremely slow with giant latencies. Of course I don’t know if that’s due to Postgres or some other design flaw…