4 ms·

Is 100k order per minute a lot? Even a single Postgres instance should serve that fine?

• smt88 5mo ago
  One assumes they mean 100,000s (plural) concurrent users actively building carts
  • aurareturn 5mo ago
    Is 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 5mo ago
      Keep in mind they’re doing real-time logistics and messaging, as well as type-ahead search and managing ads and promotions
      • aurareturn 5mo ago
        I 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 5mo ago
  Average throughput is one thing, tail latency, quite another.
• tomtomtom777 5mo ago
  100k(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 5mo ago
    According 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 5mo ago
      Instacard 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 5mo ago
        This data set was released years before the Covid hypergrowth phase which they are referring to.
        • FinnKuhn 5mo ago
          That'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/
        • deleted 5mo ago
• outworlder 5mo ago
  It's orders, not queries. Who knows how many requests that actually takes.