Scaling Reads easy
You have users all over the world downloading large images from your server in New York. Users in Australia complain it is slow. What solves this?
- A Increasing the New York server's CPU.
- B Zipping the images.
- C Using a larger database.
- D Using a CDN to cache copies of the images on servers physically closer to the users (e.g., in Sydney).
Answer: D. Using a CDN to cache copies of the images on servers physically closer to the users (e.g., in Sydney).
Latency is largely determined by physical distance (speed of light). A CDN puts the content close to the user, drastically reducing the travel time for the data.
One system design question a day, with spaced repetition so the ones you miss come back.
Get the appRelated questions
- In a caching system, what is a 'Cache Miss'?
- Why is `SELECT * FROM Users` generally discouraged in high-performance applications compared to `SELECT name, email FROM Users`?
- What is the main downside of reading from a Read Replica instead of the Primary database?
- You have maximized the RAM on your single database server, but it's still too slow. You decide to add 10 more servers to share the load. What is this called?
- You have 5 Read Replicas. How does the application know which one to ask for data?
- In a Primary-Replica architecture, which operation is typically ONLY allowed on the Primary node?