Design a high-throughput Load Balancing System
Last updated: September 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
TikTok
September 26, 2025133
6
4,791 solved
Design a high-throughput load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
TikTok asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Explain the concept clearly with a practical example
- Discuss when and why to apply this principle
- Identify common mistakes and anti-patterns
- Compare with alternative approaches
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
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Core Design Principles
In designing a high-throughput load balancing system for TikTok, we prioritize the CAP theorem, which states that a distributed system can only guarantee two out of the following three properties:...
Architecture
The proposed architecture consists of a microservices-oriented design using a distributed load balancer that can scale horizontally. This would involve deploying multiple instances of the load bal...
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