Code RoomCache misses from nonexistent products
HardPrep Room Coding #2415

Cache misses from nonexistent products

On-callReliability & on-callDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~35 min

Starting at 22:45, your API's cache-hit ratio is normal at 88% but the origin database load has quietly doubled and a specific set of product-lookup endpoints is slow. Logs show a flood of requests for product IDs that don't exist (random-looking integers), each one a cache miss that falls through to a DB query returning no rows. The traffic is coming from a wide spread of IPs. No deploy happened. How do you triage and mitigate?

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

0:00 of about 35 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.