2 posts tagged with "system-design"

Here's a question that sounds impossible: can you check if an element is in a set of 1 billion items using only 1.2 GB of RAM, with lookups completing in constant time, and never producing a false negative? Oh, and the data structure is a single contiguous array of bits; no pointers, no allocations, no garbage collection pauses.

The answer is yes. It's called a Bloom filter, and once you understand it, you'll see it everywhere; from the database engine under your app to Chrome's malicious URL checker to the network switches routing your packets.

This post goes deep. Not "here's a pretty diagram" deep. "I need to tune the false positive rate for a production system handling 400K QPS" deep.

Every time I read a "how the internet works" article, I cringe - they all stop at DNS → TCP → HTTP → HTML. That's like explaining a car engine by saying "fuel goes in, wheels spin." Super helpful when the engine is on fire.

This post is what I wish someone had handed me when I was staring at a waterfall chart at 3 AM, wondering why a page took 4 seconds to load on a 1 Gbps connection. We're going to trace every system boundary crossing - from the electrical signal your keyboard fires to the GPU draw call that lights up the final pixel.