Designing a Scalable Real‑Time Video Ranking System for Billions of Views
This article walks through the complete system‑design process for a Douyin‑style video leaderboard, covering requirement analysis, functional and non‑functional specs, scale estimation, single‑machine baseline, fault‑tolerance, sharding, time‑window handling with a double‑pointer method, and caching strategies to achieve low latency, high throughput, and precise results at massive scale.
