Ask HN: What is the normal distribution of scale?

1 point

8 years ago

It's common for this to be measured in Requests per Second (RPS) or Queries per Second (QPS). When most people think of services at scale, they think of Google, or more specifically Search. Which does greater than 40k RPS [1], though that number is difficult to identify since it's made up of many subsystems and internal services.[2]

But then there are also IoT platforms that ingest maybe an order of magnitude more requests.

Those services likely fall outside the 99.7% or three standard deviations of all services that receive traffic.

What would you expect the volume of traffic to be for other standard deviations? For example how many would fall within 10k RPS? 95%? And what would you expect the mean to be?

If we extend this to socket-based communication, such as some games, would these numbers change?

[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

[2] https://www.quora.com/Google-processes-40k-searches-per-second-On-average-a-web-server-can-handle-1000-requests-per-second-Does-that-mean-Google-can-run-using-only-40-web-servers/answer/Andrew-McGregor-12