System designHardsd-g072

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

Question

Design a real-time trending-topics system for a global social platform processing 500k events/sec (posts, hashtags, shares). 'Trending' should surface topics with abnormal velocity — not just high absolute volume — refreshed every 60s, regionalized, and resistant to coordinated spam bursts.

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.