Catalog

• Clarify the requirements
• Capacity Estimation
• System APIs
• High-level System Design
• Data Storage
• Scalability

Step1: Clarify the requirements

Clarify requirements and goals of the system

• Requirements
• Traffic size(e.g. Daily Active User)

Nobody expect you do design a complete system in 30-40 mins

Discuss the functionalities, align with interviewers or components to focus

Type1: Functional Requirement

1. Tweet
   • a. Create
   • b. Delete
2. Timeline/Feed
   • a. Home
   • b. User
3. Follow a user
4. Like a tweet
5. Search tweets
   ...

Type2: Non-Functional Requirement

• Consistency
  • Every read receives the most recent write or an error
  • Sacrifice: Eventual consistency
• Availability
  • Every request receives a response, without the guarantee that it contains the most recent write
  • Scalable
    • Performance: low latency
• Partion tolerance(Fault Tolerance)
  • The system continues to operate despite an arbitrary number of messages being dropped by the network between nodes

Step2: Capacity Estimation

Assumption:
- 200 million DAU, 100 million new tweets
- Each user: visit home timeline 5 times; other user timeline 3 times
- Each timeline/page has 20 tweets
- Each tweet has size 280 bytes, matadatda 30 bytes
- per photo: 200kb, 20% tweets have images
- per video: 2mb, 10% tweets have video, 30% videos will be watched

Storage Estimate

• Write size daily:
  • Text：
    • 100M new tweets*(280+30)bytes/tweet = 31GB/day
  • Image:
    • 4TB/day
  • Video:
    • 20TB/day
• Total
  • 24TB/day

Bandwidth Estimate (Social Networking => read heavy)

Daily Read Tweets Volume:
- 200M * (5 home visit + 3 user visit) * 20 tweets/page = 32B tweets/day
Daily Read Bandwidth:

• Text: 23B * 280bytes / 86400 = 100MB/s
• Image: 14GB/s
• Video: 20GB/s
• Total: 35GB/s

Step3: System APIs

postTweet(userToken, string tweet)

deleteTweet(userToken, string tweetId)

likeOrUnlikeTweet(userToken, string tweetId, bool like)

readHomeTimeLine(userToken, int pageSize, opt string pageToken)

readUserTimeLine(userToken, int pageSize, opt string pageToken)

Step4: High-Level System Design:

• post tweets

• user timeline(push/pull mode)

https://medium.com/@winapp/read-fast-with-fan-out-write-f25257117297

Home Timeline (cant d)

Fan out on write

• Not efficient for users with huge amount of followers(like Taylor Swift)

Hybrid Solution

• Non-hot users:

  • fan out on write(push)

• Hot users:

  • fan in on write(pull): read during timeline request from tweets cache, and aggregate with results from non-hot users

Step5: Data Storage

principles

• SQL database:
  • e.g, user table
• NoSQL database:
  • e.g, timelines
• File system:
  • media file: image, audio, video

Step6: Scalability

• Identify potential bottlenecks
• Discussion solutions, focusing on tradeoffs
  • Data sharding
    • data store, cache
  • Load balancing
    • user <-> application server
    • application server <-> cache server
    • application server <-> db
  • Data caching
    • read heavy

Sharding

Why?

• impossible to store/process all data in a single machine

How?

• Break large tables into smaller shards on multiple servers

Pros

• Horizontal scaling

Cons

• Complexity(distributed query, resharding...)

Option 1: shard by tweets‘ creation time

Pros:

• Limited shards to query

Cons:

• Hot/Cold data issue
• New shards fill up quickly

Option 2: Shard by hash(userId): store all the data of user on a single shard

Pros:

• Simple
• Query user timeline is straightforward

Cons:

• Home timeline stall needs to query multiple shards
• Non-uniform distribution of storage
• Hot users
• Availability

Option 3: Shard by hash(tweetId)

Pros:

• uniform distribution
• high availability

Cons:

• need to query all shards in order to generate user/home timeline（cache solution）

Caching

Why?

• social networks have heavy read traffic
• queries can be slow and cosyly

How?

• store hot/ precompuyed data in memory, reads can much faster

Timeline service

• user timelinme: user_id -> {tweet_id}
• home timeline: user_id -> {tweet_id}
• tweets: tweet_id -> tweet

Topics:

• caching policy
• sharding
• performance

ref

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMCdWr6ejpw&list=PLLuMmzMTgVK4RuSJjXUxjeUt3-vSyA1Or&index=1

system design(how to design tweet)