Design a high-throughput Chat System
Last updated: January 15, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput chat system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
January 15, 2026170
12
1,764 solved
Design a high-throughput chat system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe asks this during the Onsite to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Users must be able to sign up, log in, and manage their profiles securely.
- Real-time Messaging: Messages should be delivered in real-time...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming an initial user base of 10 million with an expected growth of 20% per year:
- Active Users: 10% of users are active daily = 1 million.
- Messages per User: Average of 20 messages per ...
Submit Your Answer
