Design a low-latency Rate Limiting System
Last updated: January 18, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency rate limiting system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.
Walmart
System Design
Software Engineer
Walmart
January 18, 2026Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Easy
795
10
1,776 solved
Design a low-latency 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 allow for configurable rate limits (e.g., 100 requests per minute) per user or IP address.
- Quota Management: Ability to track a...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming we need to handle 10 million requests per minute:
- Per Second: 10 million requests / 60 seconds = ~166,667 requests per second.
- Per User: If we assume an average of 100,000 active ...
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