OpenAI has detailed how it scaled its PostgreSQL database infrastructure to support over 800 million ChatGPT users, handling a tenfold increase in load over the past year. The company achieved this by implementing extensive optimizations at both the application and database layers, including scaling up instance sizes and out with numerous read replicas across multiple regions. Despite PostgreSQL's limitations with write-heavy workloads due to its MVCC implementation, OpenAI has managed to sustain massive global traffic with a single primary instance and nearly 50 read replicas, while migrating some write-intensive tasks to sharded systems like Azure Cosmos DB. AI
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RANK_REASON This is a technical deep-dive into infrastructure scaling for a popular product, not a new product or model release.
