How and Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Distributed Graph: Part 3 — Querying the graph with gRPC execution API

2026-08-10

Netflix's RDG query layer handles 8 billion nodes and 150 billion edges using level-by-level parallel traversal, 16 to 24 async threads per instance, and cache TTLs matched to data volatility that achieve 70 to 80% hit rates on stable entities. The result is that even three-hop traversals complete under 150 ms at P99.