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Open Ticketmaster (Seat Booking) →Open Instagram Feed →

Ticketmaster (Seat Booking) vs Instagram Feed

Ticketmaster (Seat Booking)

Ticketmaster (Seat Booking)

Seat holds, payment timeouts, virtual queue for hot events.

Components (8)

  • Browser / Mobile
  • Virtual Queue
  • API Gateway
  • Booking Service
  • Seat Locks
  • Postgres
  • Postgres
  • Stripe

Headline numbers

  • Seat reservation QPS at peak drop~10K/sec
  • Virtual queue depth at peakUp to 500K
  • Steady-state seat ops<100/sec
Instagram Feed

Instagram Feed

Fan-out on write vs read, ranking, CDN.

Components (10)

  • Mobile Client
  • CDN
  • API Gateway
  • Feed Service
  • Post Service
  • Kafka
  • Fan-out Worker
  • Redis
  • Postgres
  • S3

Headline numbers

  • Posts / sec (avg)~3,000/sec
  • Feed read QPS~58,000/sec
  • Fan-out writes / sec~600,000/sec

Key differences

Only in Ticketmaster (Seat Booking)
  • Stripe
In both
  • Client
  • Queue
  • Api Gateway
  • Service
  • Cache
  • Database
Only in Instagram Feed
  • CDN
  • S3

Flow shape

Ticketmaster (Seat Booking) flows
  • Buy a ticket (happy path)7 steps
  • ⚠ User abandons checkout4 steps
  • Hot event drop: millions hit at once2 steps
Instagram Feed flows
  • Post a photo (fan-out on write)7 steps
  • Open feed (precomputed timeline)5 steps
  • ⚠ Fan-out Worker is down7 steps
  • ⚠ Timeline cache flushed (Redis restart)4 steps