Systems Design Trivia Questions

Sample Systems Design Questions

Think you know the answers? Play to find out.

1. 1.Before a browser can load a page, it asks this hierarchical directory to turn a typed name like example.com into a numeric machine address.

   • DNS
   • DHCP
   • CDN
   • NAT

2. 2.To avoid recomputing or refetching identical results, systems keep recently used data in this fast, temporary storage layer close to the application.

   • Buffer
   • Cache
   • Log
   • Ledger

3. 3.Positioned in front of a pool of servers, this component spreads incoming traffic so that no single machine becomes overwhelmed.

   • Reverse proxy
   • API gateway
   • Load balancer
   • Firewall

4. 4.Streaming and news sites place copies of images and videos on edge servers near users through this geographically distributed system.

   • VPN
   • DNS
   • ISP
   • CDN

5. 5.Usually measured in milliseconds, this metric captures the delay between sending a request and receiving the first response.

   • Latency
   • Throughput
   • Bandwidth
   • Jitter

6. 6.Often reported in requests per second, this metric describes how much work a system can complete within a fixed window of time.

   • Bandwidth
   • Throughput
   • Uptime
   • Latency

7. 7.Like the diameter of a pipe, this describes the maximum data-carrying capacity of a network link in a given second.

   • Frequency
   • Latency
   • Bandwidth
   • Throughput

8. 8.Much like the alphabetized listing at the back of a textbook, a database uses this structure to find rows without scanning every record.

   • View
   • Trigger
   • Schema
   • Index

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