Interview Q&A / System Design
System Design interview questions
Caching, scaling, databases and classic design problems for beginners.
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- How would you design a rate limiter?
A rate limiter caps how many requests a client can make in a time window, for example 100 per minute per user, and rejects extras with HTTP 429. Common algorithms are token bucket (allows short bursts), fixed window, sliding window log and sliding window counter. In a distributed system the counters live in a shared store like Redis and are updated atomically.
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