Advanced
System Design
Q99 / 100
When designing a system to handle "hot spots" in a sharded database where one shard receives disproportionate traffic, what is an effective mitigation beyond simply re-sharding?
Correct! Well done.
Incorrect.
The correct answer is A) Adding a caching layer in front of the hot shard, or splitting the hot key's data further (e.g., by appending a sub-key/salt) to spread its load across multiple shards
A
Correct Answer
Adding a caching layer in front of the hot shard, or splitting the hot key's data further (e.g., by appending a sub-key/salt) to spread its load across multiple shards
Explanation
In addition to rebalancing shards, caching absorbs read load for hot keys, and techniques like key salting can split a single hot key's writes across multiple underlying partitions, reducing pressure on any one shard.
Progress
99/100