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by twawaaay 1321 days ago
I am not saying you can't. I totally believe you do.

Modern hardware is totally able to execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second on a single core. If your query is simple and you can organise getting the data from storage at the necessary speeds you should totally be able to do this many requests, possibly even tens of millions.

But handling one million queries per second is completely different from having database server making progress on one million queries in parallel. What happens is, the database server is only making progress on a small number of them (typically in tens up to hundreds on a very beefy hardware) and everything else is just queued up.

There are much, much better ways to queue up millions of things than opening a million connections to get each one done individually.

1 comments

Lambda was a means to an end for us here, and we're not specifically endorsing its use in _this_ way. Our goal was explicitly to test our ability to handle many parallel connections, and to observe what that looked like from different angles.

We're a DBaaS company, and we do need to be prepared for anything users may throw at us. Our Global Routing infrastructure has seen some major upgrades/changes recently to help support new features like PlanetScale Connect and our serverless drivers.

From our point of view, this was a sizing exercise with the interesting side benefit that many people do happen to use Serverless Functions similarly.