Design a fault-tolerant Rate Limiting System
Last updated: January 14, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant rate limiting system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.
Walmart
System Design
Software Engineer
Walmart
January 14, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Easy
89
8
1,069 solved
Design a fault-tolerant 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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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Rate Limiting: The system must enforce limits on the number of requests per user (IP address) within a specified time window (e.g., 100 requests per minute).
- **Us...
Capacity Estimation
Walmart's online platform processes roughly 1 million concurrent users during peak hours. Assuming each user makes an average of 5 requests per minute, the system needs to handle:
- **Total Requests ...
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