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hardSystem Design

How would you design Twitter's timeline and search? (Facebook feed)

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01

Understand the problem

Design a hybrid fan-out timeline and inverted-index search that scales to millions of followers and low-latency reads.

twittertimelinefanoutsearchfeedredisranking
02

Attempt it yourself

Sketch your approach before reading the solution — that's what interviews test.

Nudge consolestandby

Stuck? Beam a request up — the console returns a conceptual nudge that guides your logic without spoiling the implementation.

03

Study the solution

Step 1: Use Cases, Constraints, Assumptions, Back-of-Envelope

Use cases

We'll scope to handle only the core flows that expose the bottlenecks; everything else is deferred.

  • User posts a tweet — 280 chars + media refs, persisted, then fanned out to followers' timelines.
  • User reads home timeline — GET

Solution ready — 2 min read

Classified // press E to declassify

04

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Transmission complete // awaiting log

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STREAK ALIVE.

Dossier 83 of 99 decoded in the System Design track. One more won't hurt.

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