As someone close to the RTB world observing from the outside, what amazes me is not the throughput or latency numbers but that it all happens on technology stacks that seem inappropriate for the problem. Everything from broadcast messages over TCP/IP or request/reply semantics for messages with no useful replies, to having to scale connections even though the number of participants is fixed. Its a whole world built on http that doesn't seem like it should be. That you can scale qps in that world while maintaining a semblance of response time is really something.
As a complete tangent, as someone who has worked in environments that had at least an order of magnitude tighter latency requirements than the RTB world, and who sees this misconception a lot, logging to disk on a modern OS is not "too slow". There may be very valid reasons not to log to disk, most obviously operational concerns, but latency/throughput aren't one of them.
As a complete tangent, as someone who has worked in environments that had at least an order of magnitude tighter latency requirements than the RTB world, and who sees this misconception a lot, logging to disk on a modern OS is not "too slow". There may be very valid reasons not to log to disk, most obviously operational concerns, but latency/throughput aren't one of them.