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Back of Envelope Calculations - Cheat Sheet

This document provides various numbers and calculations that may be useful for systems design, such as: - Estimating storage needs based on number of users and average file sizes (e.g. 1 million users storing 100KB files daily would be 100GB of storage needed) - Common object and data sizes like files, web pages, images, videos - Estimates of users/visits for major websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter - Performance numbers for different storage and network technologies - Estimated request capacities for different system types like SQL databases, caches, and queues.

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Kun Huang
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© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
355 views

Back of Envelope Calculations - Cheat Sheet

This document provides various numbers and calculations that may be useful for systems design, such as: - Estimating storage needs based on number of users and average file sizes (e.g. 1 million users storing 100KB files daily would be 100GB of storage needed) - Common object and data sizes like files, web pages, images, videos - Estimates of users/visits for major websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter - Performance numbers for different storage and network technologies - Estimated request capacities for different system types like SQL databases, caches, and queues.

Uploaded by

Kun Huang
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The following article lists various numbers at the time I did the research that I found

useful for systems design, but is no longer being updated.

Note: All the numbers in this post are heavily rounded as their purpose is to give a
rough guide for design decisions in the moment. You should always do more precise
calculations before starting on a project/feature.

Useful Calculations
x Million users * y KB = xy GB
example: 1M users * a documents of 100KB per day = 100GB per day.

x Million users * y MB = xy TB
example: 200M users * a short video of 2MB per day = 400TB per day.

Byte Number Sizes

The number of zeros after thousands increments by 3.

Thousands = KB (3 zeros)
Millions = MB(6 zeros)
Billions = GB (9 zeros)
Trillions = TB (12 zeros)
Quadrilions = PB (15 zeros)

Byte Conversions
1B = 8bits
1KB = 1000B
1MB = 1000KB
1GB = 1000MB

Object Sizes
Data
The numbers vary depending on the language and implementation.

char: 1B (8 bits)

char (Unicode): 2B (16 bits)

Short: 2B (16 bits)

Int: 4B (32 bits)


Long: 8B (64 bits)

UUID/GUID: 16B

Objects
File: 100 KB

Web Page: 100 KB (not including images)

Picture: 200 KB

Short Posted Video: 2MB

Steaming Video: 50MB per minute

Long/Lat: 8B
Lengths
Maximum URL Size: ~2000 (depends on browser)

ASCII charset: 128

Unicode charset: 143, 859

Per Period Numbers


The following numbers are heavily rounded and help determine how often
something needs to happen over a period of time. For example, if a server has a
million requests per day, it will need to handle 12 requests per second.
Heavily rounded per time period numbers.

More complex example:

100M photos (200KB) are uploaded daily to a server.

100 (number of millions) * 12 (the number per second for 1M) = 1200 uploads a
second.

1200 (uploads) * 200KB (size of photo) = 240MB per second.

The web servers will need to handle a network bandwidth of 240MB per second. You
will therefore need a machine with high network performance to handle this
bandwidth. In AWS this would translate to at least a m4.4xlarge, but it would be
better to have multiple smaller servers to handle fault tolerance.

Usage
Users
Facebook: 2.27B | YouTube: 2B | Instagram: 1B

Pinterest: 332M | Twitter: 330M | Onedrive: 250M

TikTok: 3.7M
Visits
You can get a rough number of the visits a site gets at the similarweb website.

Facebook: 26.12B | Twitter: 6.34B | Pinterest: 1.32B

Spotify: 293M | Ikea: 233M | Nike: 110M

Argos: 54M | John Lewis: 37M |Superdry: 3.5M

Virgin Money: 1.8M | Aviva: 1.61M

Cost of Operations
Read sequentially from HDD: 30 MB/s

Read sequentially from SSD: 1 GB/s

Read sequentially from memory: 4 GB/s

Read sequentially from 1Gbps Ethernet: 100MB/s


Cross continental network: 6–7 world-wide round trips per second.

Systems
These are not exact numbers, which very much depend on the implementation and
what is hosting the service. The purpose of the numbers is to have a general idea of
the performance across different types of services.

SQL Databases
Storage: 60TB

Connections: 30K

Requests: 25K per second


Cache
[Redis — Requests][Redis — connections]

Storage: 300 GB

Connections: 10k

Requests: 100k per second


Web Servers
Requests: 5–10k requests per second

Queues/Streams
[Pub/Sub — limits][Kinesis — limits][SQS — limits]

Requests: 1000–3000 requests/s

Throughput: 1MB-50MB/s (Write) / 2MB-100MB/s (Read)

Scrapers
[Colly — go scraper]

Requests: 1000 per second


Please share with all your friends on social media and hit that clap button below to spread
the word. Leave a response of numbers you find useful for systems design.
If you liked this post, then please follow me and check out some of my other
articles.

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