System Design · Case Studies
Case Study: Social Feed
Design, trade-offs, and alternatives for a social news feed at scale.
01
Chapter One
Problem Statement
Problem Statement
Coming Soon
Problem Statement
This chapter covers social feed scale: users, posts per day, feed reads QPS, latency SLA, and the celebrity problem.
📋 Chapter 1 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
02
Chapter Two
Questions to Ask
Questions to Ask
Coming Soon
Questions to Ask
This chapter covers key questions: chronological vs ranked feed, follow vs friend model, content types, pagination.
📋 Chapter 2 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
03
Chapter Three
Naive Design
Naive Design
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Naive Design
This chapter covers fan-out on read: aggregating a feed at query time and why it breaks at celebrity follower counts.
📋 Chapter 3 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
04
Chapter Four
Refined Design
Refined Design
Coming Soon
Refined Design
This chapter covers hybrid fan-out: pre-computed fan-out on write for normal users, fan-out on read for celebrities.
📋 Chapter 4 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
05
Chapter Five
Alternatives
Alternatives
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Alternatives
This chapter covers two approaches: fan-out on write vs fan-out on read — trade-offs in freshness and storage.
📋 Chapter 5 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
06
Chapter Six
Real Companies
Real Companies
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Real Companies
This chapter covers how Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn handle feed generation for their scale and data model.
📋 Chapter 6 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
07
Chapter Seven
Best Practices
Best Practices
Coming Soon
Best Practices
This chapter covers cursor-based pagination, feed cache warming, separate read/write paths via CQRS.
📋 Chapter 7 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
08
Chapter Eight
What Could Go Wrong
What Could Go Wrong
Coming Soon
What Could Go Wrong
This chapter covers stale feeds after unfollow, thundering herd on celebrity post, infinite scroll breaking at depth.
📋 Chapter 8 — Summary
- Summary content pending.