"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 :)

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aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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tomtomtom777 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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true_religion an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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/1579091/000157909126...

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FinnKuhn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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-bas... [2] https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/284199_5c498037...

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andriy_koval 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

it could be peak orders per second

	▲	ktm5j a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I'd wager on this.

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nijave an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That doesn't necessarily mean _new_ orders per minute. Their app or website could poll for updates every 15 seconds

Could just be looking at the "orders" endpoint in their app which might also include incremental updates as shoppers get items from the store. It's a fairly ambiguous statement

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dotancohen an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Amazon does 20k peak, or 20k average? Website visitor peaks could easily be two orders of magnitude higher traffic than average for a few minutes.

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22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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aurareturn 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I worked at a company that had billions of views per year on a single big Postgres instance. Extremely read heavy with many queries needed for a page load. You can cache a lot of things.

	▲	dotancohen 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but that's not a shopping cart, or a checkout workflow, nor a web store with heavy analytics.

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outworlder 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's orders, not queries. Who knows how many requests that actually takes.

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smt88 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One assumes they mean 100,000s (plural) concurrent users actively building carts

	▲	aurareturn 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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nine_k 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Average throughput is one thing, tail latency, quite another.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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azinman2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’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…

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qaq 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

why did we switch to per minute? A modern quality enterprise SSD can do 35K +/- legit fsyncs per second.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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paoliniluis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Legends