Surprised that 80K/second is called "massive" for Amazon.com's main search feature.
req/s from localhost to localhost, and req/s from the Internet to any user.
The latter is actually interesting. People saying you can get 10k req/s from Node.js is stupid. You're not actually getting that on say, a single low-end instance over the Internet, which is what most developers are actually going to do.
Instead, you'll get two orders of magnitude fewer requests per second.
What Amazon is talking about here is most likely non-synthetic, real-world 80k requests per second. Which is actually a decent job.
No, it's not, for exactly the reason you state:
> You're not actually getting that on say, a single low-end instance over the Internet
Some languages are, of course, more efficient, but it doesn't matter - you can get very good performance out of any language/runtime - it's all about your architecture and infrastructure.
From what I've measured, code I've written performs around the same in production as it ran locally given similar hardware. If you're deploying to a VM with 3000 IOPS and 1/2 a CPU core, obviously it's going to run like garbage. If you wouldn't run your business on a raspberry pi 3, you probably shouldn't be running it on an AWS xlarge instance either.
I imagine search is more complex and expensive than CRUD, but 80k isn't something you can only do with a "hello world" tier application.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/youtube-run...
About a decade ago Opera Mini did 150k transcoded full pageloads/s (times about 30 inlines per pageload that was the average back then, so about 4.5 million requested/loaded/processed/compressed HTTP resources/s).
(All of the public Google Search numbers I've seen have seemed one or two orders of magnitudes too small. Or maybe most people don't use their search engine/browser as much as I do, so my perspective is skewed...)
There is surprisingly little seasonal variance. You have your weekly/daily traffic rhythms based on when your users are awake/active based on their geographical distribution and that's mostly it.
"World events" also have very little impact - they tend to barely make a dent in that massive background noise.
Before we had large volumes of traffic I thought we'd be seeing all sorts of unusual peaks, after a few years I realized growth at scale tends to become boring (but in a good way).
For example, it is just as true for this title to have said "How Amazon uses ... to load 1.6 MM requests per second, from just the search page."
Each search page load, is 1 request to the search backend, but 20x request fanout to the product's key-value store to render the images and titles, etc.