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 3 hours 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 2 hours 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...

	▲	aeyes an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This data set was released years before the Covid hypergrowth phase which they are referring to.

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andriy_koval 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it could be peak orders per second

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

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nijave 2 hours 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 3 hours 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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aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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dotancohen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but that's not a shopping cart, or a checkout workflow, nor a web store with heavy analytics.

	▲	aurareturn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It was one of the top real estate portals in the world. A lot of geolocation searches. New search every time someone moves the map. A ton of data sent to the client. Analytics in every page view. No clue how a shopping cart or checkout flow would drastically increase database load. It should just be basic CRUD. Building a shopping cart is something every student makes. Pages in a web store can be cached relatively easily since items won't change often. A primary DB with a few replicas and caching can go a really long way.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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