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Ask HN: How much traffic do you serve and with which database engine?

73 points ajhool | 1 comments | 14 Mar 25 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source

It's common to see here that Postgres hosted in RDS can handle 99% of workloads up to millions of users. I'm building an IoT app with a plan to ingest the IoT traffic into dynamo partitioned on user id (I'm quite familiar with the tradeoffs) and everything else be in Postgres. A few services but not microservice (basically: core service, identity service, IoT data service, notification service). Ingesting and monitoring about 1,000,000 IoT devices daily (1 packer per device per day) and about 1,000,000 users with only 5,000 active users per day (basically we monitor user IoT devices 24/7 but only some 5,000 users will have anomalous results and log in).

In the database posts & discussions here I sometimes find that the opinions are strong but the numbers are missing. Obviously applications have wide variation in traffic and query complexity so apples to apples comparisons are hard. Still, I would greatly benefit from hearing some real world experiences with numbers.

Rough approximation database questions for current or prior applications:

1. How many customers do you have?

2. What's expected daily traffic? Peak traffic?

3. What database engine or engines do you use?

4. How many rows or how much storage does your db have?

5. What else about your application is relevant for database load?

6. Microservice, Service, or monolith. Happy with it?

1. mattmanser ◴[14 Mar 25 21:33 UTC] No.43367540[source]▶
5,000 users PER DAY is trivial sauce, you're totally worrying about something ridiculous. Even a crap server with crap code should handle that.

BTW most databases on a decent server could totally handle that 1 million IoT updates per day too. 1 packet per day is nothing. Unless they all come at once. That is also a fairly trivial load, if it's spread out. A small VM could handle that.

You are way off on your understanding of what is a heavy load.

You could load test with something like k6 if you want to find out. Try 'emulating' the requests and average users.

I often test with 5,000 requests per second, 5,000 users per day with 20-30 requests each is several orders of magnitude less load.