eli5 , How does a server receive thousands of requests at a time ?

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I always wonder how a server like google server receive thousands of request from people at once! I understand the signals are passed through fibernet cable, but won’t those signals collide ? Or how can some small wire handle soo many requests at once ? iin my mind a wire can only take one request at a time. I know these happens close to light speed, but still! its very hard to understand.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Requests are sent in chunks called packets. Each one of these packets has some information about who sent it and where it’s going. The server uses this information to keep requests distinct.

The fiber optic networks in use in datacenters are at minimum 100Gbps. That’s 1,000,000,000 bits per second. The maximum size of a packet(TCP but that’s not really important) is 65,535 bytes so one fiber connection can handle 15,259 requests **per second**.

Also, the data isn’t sent in a solid, unbroken stream. All the data can be jumbled together with other network traffic and the network hardware and servers deal with re-combining message streams

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