Software Systems Design Trivia Questions

Sample Software Systems Design Quiz Questions

A mix of easy, medium and hard — questions run from warm-up to expert, so there's a real challenge at every level. Think you know the answers? Play to find out.

1. 1.Netflix famously uses this strategy to store copies of popular shows at ISPs and network edges, reducing latency and bandwidth costs dramatically.

   Difficulty: Easy
   • Content Delivery Network (CDN)
   • Load Balancer
   • Database Replica
   • Message Queue

2. 2.CockroachDB uses hybrid logical clocks that combine physical timestamps with logical counters, solving the clock synchronization problem that NTP alone cannot guarantee to within this precision level.

   Difficulty: Medium
   • Nanoseconds
   • Microseconds
   • Milliseconds
   • Hundreds of Milliseconds

3. 3.LMDB achieves crash consistency without write-ahead logging by using copy-on-write B+trees that atomically update the root pointer via this filesystem guarantee.

   Difficulty: Hard
   • Journaling
   • Write Barriers
   • Atomic Page Write
   • Sync Operations

4. 4.Instagram stores user photos in Amazon S3 and profile data in PostgreSQL, exemplifying how different data types benefit from specialized storage—a pattern called this.

   Difficulty: Easy
   • Database Sharding
   • Data Replication
   • Polyglot Persistence
   • Eventual Consistency

5. 5.Cockroach Labs found that splitting ranges at 512MB optimizes the balance between metadata overhead and this operational concern that affects cluster rebalancing.

   Difficulty: Medium
   • Range Movement Time
   • Query Latency
   • Memory Usage
   • CPU Utilization

6. 6.Microsoft's FASTER achieves millions of operations per second by pinning hot data in a memory-resident hash index while spilling cold data to this tiered structure.

   Difficulty: Hard
   • B-Tree
   • Hybrid Log
   • Bloom Filter
   • Skip List

7. 7.GitHub adds more servers to handle increased traffic rather than upgrading existing hardware—the fundamental difference between horizontal and this alternative approach.

   Difficulty: Easy
   • Diagonal Scaling
   • Elastic Scaling
   • Vertical Scaling
   • Auto Scaling

8. 8.Jepsen testing revealed that MongoDB's causal consistency implementation could violate guarantees when network partitions resolved, a violation of this session guarantee property.

   Difficulty: Medium
   • Read Your Writes
   • Monotonic Reads
   • Monotonic Writes
   • Writes Follow Reads

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