System Design · Senior · Question 38 of 75
How does designing a read-heavy system differ from a write-heavy one?
- ✓Correct answer: Reads - caches and replicas; writes - queues and sharding
- 2No difference: architecture doesn't depend on the operation ratio
- 3Read-heavy systems don't use databases
Explanation
A product catalog is read thousands of times more often than it changes - it pays to cache and scale reads. Collecting metrics or logs is a stream of writes: ingestion via a queue, batch writes and partitioning matter.