MCQ Assessment
Week 0 Foundations - MCQ Assessment
120 QuestionsAnswered: 0 / 120
Part 1: System Design Fundamentals & Interview Framework
Questions 1-15
Question 1
What is the primary difference between High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD)?
Question 2
In the system design interview framework, which step should come FIRST?
Question 3
What is a functional requirement?
Question 4
Which of the following is a non-functional requirement?
Question 5
What does a 1000:1 read-to-write ratio typically indicate?
Question 6
For a URL shortener service, which component is responsible for generating unique short codes?
Question 7
What is the benefit of using stateless API servers?
Question 8
In system design interviews, what should you do when given a vague problem statement?
Question 9
What is the typical time allocation for the High-Level Design phase in a 45-minute interview?
Question 10
Which of these is NOT typically part of High-Level Design?
Question 11
What does "Single Responsibility Principle" mean in component design?
Question 12
What is the primary purpose of a database schema in Low-Level Design?
Question 13
What is an API contract?
Question 14
Which HTTP status code should a URL shortener return when redirecting?
Part 2: Infrastructure Building Blocks
Questions 16-35
Question 15
What design pattern is demonstrated when separating URL creation from URL resolution into different services?
Question 16
What is the primary purpose of a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
Question 17
What happens during a CDN cache "miss"?
Question 18
Which content should NEVER be cached on a CDN?
Question 19
What does the Cache-Control header "max-age=31536000, immutable" indicate?
Question 20
Which cache invalidation strategy is BEST for static assets like app.js?
Question 21
What is the difference between Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing?
Question 22
Which load balancing algorithm ensures a client always connects to the same server?
Question 23
What is a health check in load balancing?
Question 24
When should you use a SQL database over NoSQL?
Question 25
What is database sharding?
Question 26
What is a potential problem with sharding by user_id?
Question 27
What is the purpose of a database read replica?
Question 28
What is replication lag?
Question 29
What does Redis primarily store data in?
Question 30
Which Redis data structure would you use for a leaderboard?
Question 31
What is the main difference between a message queue and an event stream?
Question 32
Which system is best for retaining events for replay and auditing?
Question 33
What is an object storage service like AWS S3 optimized for?
Question 34
What is the typical consistency model for object storage like S3?
Part 3: Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation
Questions 36-50
Question 35
What is the purpose of a search engine like Elasticsearch?
Question 36
How many seconds are there in a day (approximately)?
Question 37
What is 2^20 approximately equal to?
Question 38
How do you convert daily requests to requests per second (RPS)?
Question 39
If a system has 100 million requests per day, what is the approximate RPS?
Question 40
What is a typical "peak factor" for normal applications (peak RPS vs average RPS)?
Question 41
How much storage does a typical tweet (text only) require?
Question 42
How much storage does a typical compressed photo require?
Question 43
What is the latency for reading 1 MB sequentially from SSD?
Question 44
What is the latency for a network round trip within the same datacenter?
Question 45
Memory is approximately how much faster than SSD?
Question 46
If you need to store 10 TB of data with 3x replication, how much total storage is needed?
Question 47
A system handles 1 billion writes per day. Each write is 1 KB. What is the daily storage growth?
Question 48
Bandwidth calculation: 1000 requests/second × 2 KB per response = ?
Question 49
How many API servers do you need if peak RPS is 50,000 and each server handles 5,000 RPS?
Part 4: Networking Fundamentals
Questions 51-70
Question 50
What is the storage requirement for 1 year of video at 7 TB per day?
Question 51
What does TCP guarantee that UDP does not?
Question 52
How many steps are in the TCP three-way handshake?
Question 53
What is the purpose of the TCP three-way handshake?
Question 54
What is "head-of-line blocking" in TCP?
Question 55
Why is UDP used for video streaming and gaming?
Question 56
What does HTTP/2 improve over HTTP/1.1?
Question 57
What transport protocol does HTTP/3 use?
Question 58
What is the purpose of DNS (Domain Name System)?
Question 59
What is a typical DNS TTL (Time To Live) for frequently changing records?
Question 60
What does the CIDR notation /24 indicate?
Question 61
What is the IP address range 10.0.0.0/8 used for?
Question 62
What is 127.0.0.1?
Question 63
What OSI layer does a Layer 7 load balancer operate at?
Question 64
What problem does connection pooling solve?
Question 65
What is ephemeral port exhaustion?
Question 66
What port does HTTPS use by default?
Question 67
What is the typical range for ephemeral (dynamic) ports?
Question 68
What does TLS/SSL provide?
Question 69
What is the latency cost of a TCP + TLS handshake?
Part 5: Operating System Concepts
Questions 71-90
Question 70
What does REST stand for in REST API?
Question 71
What is the main difference between a process and a thread?
Question 72
What is the purpose of fork() in Unix/Linux?
Question 73
What is Copy-on-Write (COW)?
Question 74
What is a mutex used for?
Question 75
What is a deadlock?
Question 76
What is a race condition?
Question 77
What is the purpose of a semaphore?
Question 78
What advantage does a read-write lock provide?
Question 79
What is context switching?
Question 80
What is the typical cost of a thread context switch?
Question 81
Why is context switching expensive?
Question 82
What is the primary benefit of async I/O (event loop)?
Question 83
What is virtual memory?
Question 84
What is a page fault?
Question 85
What is thrashing?
Question 86
What does a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) cache?
Question 87
What is the purpose of DMA (Direct Memory Access)?
Question 88
What is the difference between blocking and non-blocking I/O?
Question 89
What is an interrupt?
Part 6: Terminology and Theory
Questions 91-120
Question 90
What is the difference between user space and kernel space?
Question 91
According to CAP theorem, what does 'P' stand for?
Question 92
What choice does CAP theorem present during a network partition?
Question 93
Which system is an example of CP (Consistency + Partition tolerance)?
Question 94
Which system is an example of AP (Availability + Partition tolerance)?
Question 95
What does the 'E' in PACELC stand for?
Question 96
What does ACID stand for?
Question 97
What does atomicity in ACID guarantee?
Question 98
What is the strongest isolation level in databases?
Question 99
What problem does Read Committed isolation level have?
Question 100
What does BASE stand for?
Question 101
What is eventual consistency?
Question 102
What is linearizability?
Question 103
What does "read-your-writes" consistency guarantee?
Question 104
What is vertical scaling?
Question 105
What is horizontal scaling?
Question 106
What is a stateless service?
Question 107
What is database sharding?
Question 108
What is the main challenge with sharding?
Question 109
What is the purpose of a write-ahead log (WAL)?
Question 110
What is MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control)?
Question 111
What is a bloom filter used for?
Question 112
What is idempotency?
Question 113
What is a two-phase commit (2PC)?
Question 114
What is the main problem with two-phase commit?
Question 115
What is eventual consistency suitable for?
Question 116
What is the difference between replication and sharding?
Question 117
What is the purpose of a consensus algorithm like Raft or Paxos?
Question 118
What is split-brain problem in distributed systems?
Question 119
What is the purpose of a heartbeat in distributed systems?
Question 120
What is back pressure in systems?
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