System designHardsd-g062

Subject Traffic shapingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design load-shedding and graceful degradation for an e-commerce site during a flash sale that drives 20x normal traffic. The checkout/payment path must stay up even if it means dropping non-essential features (recommendations, reviews, analytics). The system must shed load before it collapses, prioritizing revenue-critical requests. Design how you classify, prioritize, and shed traffic, and how you decide when to start shedding.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.