Modern in-memory caches like Redis can handle over 100,000 operations per second per instance. Understanding this capability helps avoid premature scaling decisions - many systems that seem to need distributed caching can actually run on a single high-performance cache instance.
In-memory caches like Redis provide sub-millisecond latency by keeping data in RAM, while SSD storage typically provides 5-30ms latency, and other storage types are significantly slower.
Modern well-tuned database instances can handle 10-20k writes per second.
Modern single database instances can handle up to 64+ TiB of storage, with some configurations supporting even more.
Modern high-performance message queues achieve 1-5ms end-to-end latency, making them fast enough to use within synchronous APIs while gaining benefits of reliable delivery and decoupling.
Modern application servers with optimized configurations can handle over 100,000 concurrent connections per instance. This capability means that connection limits are rarely the first bottleneck - CPU utilization typically becomes the constraint before running out of connection capacity.
