System designHardsd-g323

Subject Content deliveryLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Computer games

Question

Design CDN caching for very large files (game/OS updates and 4K video segments, files of 5–50GB) where most clients only fetch ranges and the working set vastly exceeds any single PoP's cache capacity. You can't cache whole files at every edge node. Design the segmentation and tiered-caching strategy, how range requests map to cacheable chunks, how you handle a launch-day spike where everyone pulls the same new 40GB game, and how the mid-tier protects the origin.

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.