Problems / Databases, medium

URL shortener

4,000 req/s, 95% redirects. Popular links are far more popular than the rest.

Free to open. Runs in your browser, no sign-up.

Your goals

Success ≥ 99.9%, p99 ≤ 100 ms and cost ≤ $1,500/month. Watch the hottest partition.

The traffic

4,000 requests a second for 45 seconds: 95% redirect (reads), 5% shorten (writes).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls API.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
APIApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Redis cache (checked first), Key-value store.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.4 replicas × 200 slots · timeout 300 ms
Redis cacheCacheAPI checks it first for reads.An in-memory cache like Redis usually answers in well under a millisecond inside one region.80% hit rate
Key-value storeKey-value storeAPI reads it when Redis cache misses. API calls it for writes.Key-value stores spread keys over partitions; one very popular key can overload a single partition.4 partitions × 400 ops/s

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