Design a real-time Search System
Last updated: January 13, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time search system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.
Walmart
System Design
Software Engineer
Walmart
January 13, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Hard
326
5
3,457 solved
Design a real-time search 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
- Search Functionality: Users should be able to search for products by keywords, categories, and filters (e.g., price range, brand).
- Real-time Updates: The sear...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate the capacity for Walmart's real-time search system:
- Daily Active Users (DAU): Assume 30 million users.
- Search Queries per User: Assume each user performs 5 searches on average ...
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