AdvancedTechnical
5 min

Scaling Message Queues

MessagingScalabilityPerformance
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Interview Question

How do you scale a message queue system like Kafka or RabbitMQ to handle millions of messages per second?

Key Points to Cover
  • Partition topics across multiple brokers
  • Tune producer batching and acks
  • Ensure consumer groups are balanced
  • Monitor lag and rebalance as needed
  • Optimize disk throughput and replication factor
Evaluation Rubric
Uses partitioning effectively30% weight
Optimizes producers/acks30% weight
Ensures consumer scaling20% weight
Optimizes infra for throughput20% weight
Hints
  • 💡Think about disk IO and partition parallelism.
Potential Follow-up Questions
  • How to monitor consumer lag?
  • What happens if a broker fails?
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