Grokking the System Design Interview, Volume II
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Payment System: Capacity Estimation

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

  • Scale: ~100,000+ merchants; peak loads of 5,000 TPS during major sales.
  • Storage: ~300 bytes per transaction record. For 1 billion transactions/year, that's roughly 300 GB of storage per year.
  • Read vs. Write Load: Approximately 70% writes (transaction inserts/updates) and 30% reads (queries). Use read replicas or caching to optimize frequent queries.
  • Network Throughput: 2,000 TPS of API calls is roughly 34 Mbps of traffic (assuming ~2 KB per request/response)

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