System Design Interview Prep Quiz Welcome to your System Design Interview Prep Quiz 1. System Design Which pattern handles temporary spikes without losing requests? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Synchronous REST Polling Queue buffering Thread.sleep() None 2. System Design Which architecture supports millions of IoT events? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer FTP Desktop app Event-driven architecture Single monolith None 3. System Design To avoid cascading retries across services, use? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Infinite retries No timeout Restart JVM Exponential backoff with jitter None 4. System Design Need tenant isolation in SaaS. Preferred architecture? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer CSV Shared global tables only FTP Logical/physical tenant isolation None 5. System Design Need global low-latency DNS routing. Use? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer SMTP Geo/Latency-based DNS Single IP FTP None 6. System Design A payment service must survive a regional outage. Best architecture? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Bigger Server Single AZ Single Region Active-Active Multi-Region None 7. System Design Need fast autocomplete suggestions. Best data structure? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Trie Heap Stack Queue None 8. System Design What should own its database in a microservices architecture? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer All services share one DB Frontend Each service API Gateway None 9. System Design Which deployment detects production issues early? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Manual deployment Big Bang Weekend release Canary Deployment None 10. System Design A cache miss causes thousands of DB queries simultaneously. Best mitigation? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Restart cache Increase JVM heap Request coalescing/Cache locking More logging None 11. System Design Which pattern prevents duplicate order submissions? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Idempotency Token Static variables Queue only More memory None 12. System Design Best place to terminate SSL/TLS? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Load Balancer/API Gateway Database Redis Kafka None 13. System Design What improves database read scalability without changing writes? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Read replicas Extra queues Vertical JVM scaling More indexes only None 14. System Design Which pattern prevents one failing dependency from exhausting all threads? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Factory Bulkhead Singleton Strategy None 15. System Design A chat application requires instant delivery. Which protocol is most suitable? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer SMTP FTP WebSocket Polling every second None 16. System Design How should large report generation be handled? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Async background job Synchronous DB HTTP request thread UI thread None 17. System Design What should APIs return for transient overload? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer 429 Too Many Requests 301 Redirect 200 OK 401 Unauthorized None 18. System Design An audit system must never lose events. Best approach? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Cache only Delete old records Overwrite rows Append-only event log None 19. System Design What is the biggest drawback of a shared database? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Tight coupling Simpler ownership Better scalability Independent deployments None 20. System Design Which store is ideal for time-series metrics? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Object storage Graph DB FTP Time-series database None 21. System Design Designing a news feed requires fast timeline retrieval. Common optimization? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Pre-compute timelines One giant query Full table scan Disable indexes None 22. System Design An e-commerce flash sale causes overselling. Best solution? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Restart DB Cron reconciliation Increase cache Inventory reservation with atomic updates None 23. System Design How should APIs expose breaking changes? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer New API version Change silently Remove fields Modify existing response None 24. System Design Which metric best measures service reliability? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Disk capacity Class count Error rate and availability Heap size None 25. System Design Which design best supports auditability of financial transactions? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Delete old records Immutable event log Cache only Update rows in place None 26. System Design A video streaming platform must reduce buffering worldwide. Best architecture? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Single data center CDN + Edge Caching Shared folder Bigger DB None 27. System Design Need to migrate from monolith with low risk. First step? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Extract one bounded context Rewrite everything Replace database Move UI first None 28. System Design Users expect notifications even if one provider fails. Best design? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Cron job Manual retry Multiple notification providers with fallback Single provider None 29. System Design Need exactly-once payment processing. Key design principle? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer More threads Polling More retries Idempotency None 30. System Design Which database fits user session storage at massive scale? Choose the best architectural decision.Deselect Answer Graph DB Redis Data Warehouse Object Storage None Loading questions... Loading questions... Please fill in the comment box below. Previous Start Quiz Next Time's up
