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Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

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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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...

This data set was released years before the Covid hypergrowth phase which they are referring to.

That's fair as the Kaggle dataset[1] is from 2017. Even assuming orders scaled with revenue (which grew to $1.5B in 2020[2]), you'd only reach a few hundred orders/minute at the pandemic peak (which lines up with the calculation above via a different method).

So I still assume the original comment isn't referring to actual orders placed.

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/psparks/instacart-market-bas... [2] https://fortune.com/2022/05/18/what-to-know-instacart-ipo/

it could be peak orders per second

I'd wager on this.

Going from 720 average to 100,000s peak still doesn't sound realistic. especially as they operate in many timezones.

i think this assumes that those orders are distributed evenly over time

And just like that you’ve done more due diligence than the VCs who just threw money at this.

Nope. Completely flawed logic that assumes equal distribution. Dunning Kruger

I thought not assuming uniform distribution was table stakes for senior engineers.

I can't say what the curve looks like, but 100,000 orders per second would consume reach official quarterly count in 15 minutes.

Since that's unlikely, this at least gives us some degree of bounds to guess what the curve looks like.

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