Design a Logging for Roblox
Last updated: July 17, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Roblox
July 17, 2025499
7
4,629 solved
Design a distributed logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Roblox. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Roblox values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
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 would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Log Ingestion: The system must accept log entries from multiple sources (game servers, clients, etc.) in real-time.
- Log Storage: Logs should be stored for a co...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Roblox has approximately 200 million active users and each user generates about 50 logs per session:
- Daily Logs:
- Active Users: 200 million
- Logs per User per Session: 50
- Ave...
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