System Design
  • Introduction
  • Glossary of System Design
    • System Design Basics
    • Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
    • Scalability - Harvard lecture
      • Scalability for Dummies - Part 1: Clones
      • Scalability for Dummies - Part 2: Database
      • Scalability for Dummies - Part 3: Cache
      • Scalability for Dummies - Part 4: Asynchronism
    • Trade-off
      • CAP Theorem
      • Performance vs scalability
      • Latency vs throughput
      • Availability vs consistency
    • Load Balancing
      • Load balancer
    • Proxies
      • Reverse proxy
    • Cache
      • Caching
    • Asynchronism
    • Processing guarantee in Kafka
    • Database
      • Relational database management system (RDBMS)
      • Redundancy and Replication
      • Data Partitioning
      • Indexes
      • NoSQL
      • SQL vs. NoSQL
      • Consistent Hashing
    • Application layer
    • DNS
    • CDN
    • Communication
      • Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events
    • Security
    • Lambda Architecture
  • OOD design
    • Concepts
      • Object-Oriented Basics
      • OO Analysis and Design
      • What is UML?
      • Use Case Diagrams
    • Design a parking lot
  • System Design Cases
    • Overview
    • Design a system that scales to millions of users on AWS
    • Designing a URL Shortening service like TinyURL
      • Design Unique ID Generator
      • Designing Pastebin
      • Design Pastebin.com (or Bit.ly)
    • Design notification system (scott)
      • Designing notification service
    • Designing Chat System
      • Designing Slack
      • Designing Facebook Messenger
    • Design Top K System
    • Designing Instagram
    • Design a newsfeed system
      • Designing Facebook’s Newsfeed
      • Design the data structures for a social network
    • Designing Twitter
      • Design the Twitter timeline and search
      • Designing Twitter Search
    • Design Youtube - Scott
      • Design live commenting
      • Designing Youtube or Netflix
    • Designing a Web Crawler
      • Designing a distributed job scheduler
      • Designing a Web Crawler/Archive (scott)
      • Design a web crawler
    • Designing Dropbox
    • Design Google Doc
    • Design Metrics Aggregation System
      • Design Ads Logging System
    • Design Instacart
    • Design a payment system
      • Airbnb - Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System
    • Design Distributed Message Queue
      • Cherami: Uber Engineering’s Durable and Scalable Task Queue in Go
    • Design Distributed Cache
      • Design a key-value cache to save the results of the most recent web server queries
    • Design a scalable file distribution system
    • Design Amazon's sales ranking by category feature
    • Design Mint.com
    • Design Autocomplete System
      • Designing Typeahead Suggestion
    • Designing an API Rate Limiter
      • Designing Rate Limiter
    • Design Google Map
      • Designing Yelp or Nearby Friends
      • Designing Uber backend
    • Designing Ticketmaster
      • Design 12306 - Scott
    • Design AirBnB or a Hotel Booking System
  • Paper Reading
    • MapReduce
  • Other Questions
    • What happened after you input the url in the browser?
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On this page
  • Message queues
  • Task queues
  • Back pressure
  • Disadvantage(s): asynchronism
  • Source(s) and further reading

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  1. Glossary of System Design

Asynchronism

PreviousCachingNextProcessing guarantee in Kafka

Last updated 4 years ago

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Asynchronous workflows help reduce request times for expensive operations that would otherwise be performed in-line. They can also help by doing time-consuming work in advance, such as periodic aggregation of data.

Message queues

Message queues receive, hold, and deliver messages. If an operation is too slow to perform inline, you can use a message queue with the following workflow:

  • An application publishes a job to the queue, then notifies the user of job status

  • A worker picks up the job from the queue, processes it, then signals the job is complete

The user is not blocked and the job is processed in the background. During this time, the client might optionally do a small amount of processing to make it seem like the task has completed. For example, if posting a tweet, the tweet could be instantly posted to your timeline, but it could take some time before your tweet is actually delivered to all of your followers.

Task queues

Tasks queues receive tasks and their related data, runs them, then delivers their results. They can support scheduling and can be used to run computationally-intensive jobs in the background.

Celery has support for scheduling and primarily has python support.

Back pressure

Disadvantage(s): asynchronism

  • Use cases such as inexpensive calculations and realtime workflows might be better suited for synchronous operations, as introducing queues can add delays and complexity.

Source(s) and further reading

is useful as a simple message broker but messages can be lost.

is popular but requires you to adapt to the 'AMQP' protocol and manage your own nodes.

is hosted but can have high latency and has the possibility of messages being delivered twice.

If queues start to grow significantly, the queue size can become larger than memory, resulting in cache misses, disk reads, and even slower performance. can help by limiting the queue size, thereby maintaining a high throughput rate and good response times for jobs already in the queue. Once the queue fills up, clients get a server busy or HTTP 503 status code to try again later. Clients can retry the request at a later time, perhaps with .

Redis
RabbitMQ
Amazon SQS
Back pressure
exponential backoff
It's all a numbers game
Applying back pressure when overloaded
Little's law
What is the difference between a message queue and a task queue?