Design a distributed Messaging System
Last updated: August 15, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed messaging system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.
Walmart
System Design
Software Engineer
Walmart
August 15, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
391
14
1,344 solved
Design a distributed messaging system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.
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.
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Message Sending and Receiving: Users should be able to send and receive messages in real-time.
- Message Storage: Store messages for at least 30 days.
- **Use...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity for the messaging system, we consider the following:
- User Base: Assume Walmart has 500 million active users.
- Daily Active Users (DAU): Approximately 10% of users are...
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