Grokking the System Design Interview, Volume II
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Flash Sale: Capacity Estimation

Step 3: Back-of-the-Envelope Capacity Estimation

Step 2 set what the system must do. Now we estimate the scale, so we know the design can handle it:

Concurrent users. Assume a peak of about 5 million users on the site at the same time. Flash sales for popular brands can draw millions of people worldwide in a short window. Not every user sends a request every second, but many refresh or move between pages again and again.

If half of them act in a given second, that is about 2.5 million operations per second

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