Capacity Estimation
Step 3 in the System Design path · 13 concepts · 10 problems
0 / 23 complete
📘 Learn Capacity Estimation from zero
A from-first-principles walkthrough that assumes no prior knowledge (generated in the enrichment pass, grounded in the source lessons).
Lessons in this topic
- ○The Estimation Method — A Repeatable 5-Step Routine
- ○Storage Estimation Playbook
- ○QPS & Throughput Playbook
- ○CPU & Server-Count Playbook
- ○Memory & Cache-Sizing Playbook
- ○Bandwidth Estimation Playbook
- ○Cost ($) Estimation Playbook
- ○From Numbers to Architecture — Decision Gates
- ○hard Traffic Amplification: Fan-out & Retry Storms
- ○hard Deriving the Peak Factor (not memorizing x2-10)
- ○hard Replication in Capacity Estimation
- ○Capacity Estimation — The Senior Corrections: Fan-out, Peak Factor, 70% Utilization & Durability (Deep Dive)
- ○Capacity Estimation Drills — Fan-out Writes, URL-Shortener Keyspace, Rate-Limiter Constraints & Failover Load (Deep Dive)
- ○easy Drill: daily & peak QPS for a social feed
- ○easy Drill: 5-year storage for a photo service
- ○easy Drill: egress bandwidth for live video
- ○medium Drill: server count for an API service
- ○medium Drill: cache size for a hot-key store
- ○medium Drill: rough monthly cloud bill
- ○medium Drill: full sizing of a URL shortener
- ○hard Drill: Twitter timeline sizing
- ○hard Drill: memory for a rate limiter
- ○hard Drill: cost trade-off — bigger cache vs more DB replicas