Design a event-driven Rate Limiting System
Last updated: October 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven rate limiting system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.
Walmart
System Design
Machine Learning Engineer
Walmart
October 13, 2025Machine Learning Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Hard
434
10
2,801 solved
Design a event-driven rate limiting 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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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Rate Limiting: The system should limit the number of requests per user to a predefined threshold (e.g., 100 requests per minute).
- Event-Driven: The system shoul...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity:
- User Base: Assuming Walmart has roughly 100 million users.
- Request Rate: If each user generates an average of 5 requests per minute, that results in approximately 500...
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